This Movie Has Lumps.

Rating: 4/10 (8 August 2006)

Maybe this was *An Important Movie* and that's why people rank it so highly, but honestly it isn't very good. In hindsight it's easy to see that Chaplin (probably all of Hollywood) was incredibly naive about the magnitude of what was really going on in the ghettos, so you can't fault him TOO much for the disconnect that affects a modern viewer, but the disconnect remains.
More disappointingly, the movie is just clunky; it's as if Chaplin had no idea that movies had progressed in sophistication since the silent era. The set pieces, those involving both the Jewish Barber and the Dictator, don't flow into each other; they just sit there like discrete lumps of storyline that progress in fits and starts, moving SOMEWHERE but never arriving at resolution. Some are funny, some less so.
What charm the movie has is strictly in the person of Chaplin himself. His parodies of Hitler's speeches were the best part of the whole thing, and there's no denying that he had a physical grace that was delightful to watch. But virtually everything he surrounded himself with was ANNOYING. Hannah was TOO DAMN American. The Storm Troopers were TOO DAMN American.
Oooh! Oooh! One more thing! I don't know what purpose was served by having Garbage be the source of evil behind the throne. It almost seems like the film is saying that, if it weren't for malign influences like Garbage, Hynckle wouldn't have been that bad a guy.