Absolutely hateful and sickening

Rating: 9/10 (29 March 2007)

Such a character as Amin Dada is hateful, and absolutely repulsive. To make a film about him is even worse than the character himself because we cannot dismiss the story at the end of the film and have to realize it is a true story that can happen again any time. Some westerners will come along and install some bloody tyrant in the place of a leader the said westerners will not like. Then they will always manage to get rid of this tyrant after, in this case, six hundred thousand dead. It is always easy for the west to sacrifice a few hundred thousand people in some supposedly backward and underdeveloped country. But the film is disgusting because a young and small Scottish doctor who is running away from his oppressive father gets baited by the monstrous grotesque and disgusting tyrant in some kind of perverse father transfer. This young kid is silly, unconscious, absurd, idiotic, criminal, absolutely spaced out to the point of making love to the President's wife and what's more getting her pregnant. She will end up dismembered and a few other Elizabethan niceties in front of her own children and he will nearly die hanging from butcher's hooks in the chest and bled like a pig if a Ugandan doctor did not save him and help him escape though he will die, and he knew it, five minutes later with a bullet in his head. We can always content ourselves with the idea the tyrant was a tyrant. But how can we satisfy our doubts with the idea that a western doctor could be the willing accomplice for a while at least and then the cowardly accomplice in spite of all his education and oaths. He does not even have the courage of killing himself to maybe remain clean in his own eyes.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne