THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND (2006)

Cast

Plot

A film dominated by one performance, Forest Whitaker's turn as the infamous dictator Idi Amin. When young Scotsman Nicholas Garrigan becomes his personal physician few of us doubt that it will inevitably end in tears, but Amin, as is so often the way with monsters, has considerable charm to go with his paranoid genocidal tendencies and the naïve Garrigan is seduced. However Garrigan's role is ambiguous; is he just dumb or is he willingly looking the other way? The film also reverses the typical stereotyping of racism wherein the young doctor's liberal version, essentially treating Afrcans as little white people, is compared unfavourably to the far more knowing, and ultimately humane, cynicism of the British Empire's obnoxious Uganda representative. It's unfortunate that the last half-an-hour degenerates into a melodramatic escape movie, but never mind just ignore the ‘based on real events and people' spiel and enjoy The Last King Of Scotland for what it is, a gripping, un-nerving thriller powered along by that truly mesmerising central performance from Forest Whitaker.