Missed opportunities

Rating: 6/10 (13 January 2007)

It's Scotland 1970 and Nicholas is going semi- skinny-dipping in some chilly loch. With him are a bunch of other new medical graduates, Afterwards he goes home for a sherry with overly-traditional parents. Or at least until the opening credits. By then, desperate to get away, he spins the globe and ends up amid hot dusty colours and rich vibrant sounds in Uganda. (You will have to work very hard to divine any deep meaning to the title.) Nicholas is a blue-eyed boy with lots of testosterone. His hormones compete for attention with newly acquired medical skills. Out in the backwoods, he assists a lone doctor and tries to seduce the doctor's wife (played by Gillian Anderson). Yet a string of coincidences soon has Nicholas playing Personal Doctor to the new President, Idi Amin.
As Amin's regime gets under way, young Nick realises he's sold his soul as it were. He's surrounded by a life of luxury - one that is paid for with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Ugandans. Worse still, 'Daddy' Amin is in no mood to let him leave.
Expect strong performances, plenty of brutality, a tense ending, and a very nasty little scene in the airport duty free. Plus some convincingly mutilated bodies in the mortuary. A thriller 'inspired by true events', The Last King of Scotland is a competent if slightly raggedy film that sticks in the mind.
On the down side, it's shot on grainy 16mm blown up to 35mm. The overall visual effect often lacks definition to the point of fuzziness. The bigger shortfall is that it has nothing to say beyond its own basic story. It could be called yet another white-conscience-in-Africa film. We hear how the Brits helped Amin to power: it would have been an ideal opportunity to suggest that countries cannot easily be 'helped' towards a better form of government until they are ready (or have earned it themselves, and so learning to appreciate and maintain it).
The Last King of Scotland lacks the moral complexity it should have. It misses, for instance, any chance to say anything of importance about the wider world or its subject matter. Unlike Constant Gardener, Tsotsi or Shooting Dogs, it concentrates mostly on weak or corrupt characters, which can make for unsatisfying viewing. Even the moral dilemmas of the young doctor are undeveloped. We watch an action-driven plot where, unless we are totally ignorant of history, we know exactly what sort of atrocities Amin will eventually get up to. The horror has been diluted; the intellectual component edited out. For a thriller, it often leaves much to be desired and we might wonder if Director Kevin Macdonald is still too wedded to the documentary genre that his been his mainstay until now.
Idi Amin had a fixation for Scotland. He gave himself many grandiose titles including 'Last King of Scotland'. One painter depicted him as Scotland's Bonnie Prince Charlie, the 'Young Pretender', who led the fight against the English army but was defeated at Culloden. Such a comparison is odious and appears to hold no deeper meaning than was capable of the disordered mind of Amin (who saw a comparison between two countries 'seeking to free themselves from the yoke of English imperialism'). It does however flesh out the almost mythical figure of Idi Amin. The character of Nicholas would hold our interest more if we did not have to credit a university mind with such stupidity in personal relations. While The Last King of Scotland has many good features, including performances that raise it well above the average, it surely deserved more. Early on in the film, the warmth and spirit of rural Uganda shines through. That humanity might have made a more moving bookend than the cold fact of numbers killed that appears before the closing credits.