Underwhelmed by the King

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

As a journalist who lived in Uganda for seven years, I was underwhelmed by The Last King of Scotland.

Yes, Forest Whitaker is good as Idi Amin, but essentially the film is a racy, pacy adventure story about a white man in Africa, with the requisite quota of sex and violence. (The sex, too, is the usual Hollywood variety, in which couplings are problem free, with no individual quirks to disturb the rush to simultaneous orgasms. Hollywood has not yet learned about contraception, though in this case theres a touch of reality in the shape of a pregnancy. )

The only twist to the yarn, apart from the historical reality of some of the incidents portrayed (the attempted assassination of Amin, the hijacked aircraft at Entebbe airport), is that the white man, Nicholas Garrigan, is not a handsome journalist - the usual centrepiece for such films - but a naïve, foolish doctor.

Amins record as a mass murderer is covered through photographs shown to Garrigan by an odious British diplomat, and by a postscript that refers to 300,000 deaths during the dictators rule, but the most gruesome on-screen violence is suffered by the white man, who survives.

Its well filmed and acted, but it wont tell you much about Uganda, or Amin, or power. In the end I couldnt help feeling: what was the point?

The New York Times critic said it best: "...the film has texture and enough intelligence to almost persuade you that it actually has something of note to say."