Idi Amin in his glory

Rating: 9/10 (2 January 2007)

He thundered and loomed and joshed and clasped. He made terrible threats and effusive promises. He laughed and raged and told bad jokes and saw enemies in the shadows and was equally at home in a dashiki as he was in a kilt.
He was Idi Amin -- or, as he preferred, His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr. Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, King of Scotland, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular. And his rule over Uganda in the 1970s was as capricious and bloody and mad as that ridiculous title suggests.
Amin, who died in exile in 2003, was a massive figure -- comical and quixotic and utterly deadly -- whose image has faded from popular culture, where he was once a favorite subject for documentaries and comic spoofs. But with "The Last King of Scotland," Amin, as portrayed with ferocious, convincing energy and zeal by Forest Whitaker, returns in all his ghastly glory. And Whitaker is so good as to ensure that anyone who sees the film will never forget Amin again.
Technically, "Last King" isn't Amin's story. It rather concerns itself with the misadventures of Nicholas Garrigan, a (fictional) recently minted doctor who decides to taste a bit of the world before inheriting his father's medical practice in Scotland. Spinning a globe, he hits on Uganda, where he makes a brief run at a fling with a married woman (Gillian Anderson) before his fateful encounter with Amin, after which he is sucked up by the president as if by a tornado, moving to the capital city, running in fast crowds and serving both as personal physician and trusted adviser to the mercurial madman.
Garrigan is played by James McEvoy (Mr. Tumnus from "The Chronicles of Narnia"), and it's a quite able performance: frisky and assertive and sexy and foolish in turns. But he positively vanishes beside Whitaker, who delivers a career-best performance as the sweaty, insidious, booming, glad-handing monster (and I say "career-best" with Whitaker's work in "Bird" well in mind). The readiest comparison is "Training Day," in which Ethan Hawke was very good and could barely hold his place on screen next to Denzel Washington. For this performance alone, "Last King" is a substantial piece of work.
Otherwise, the film is estimable but not quite great. Working from an adaptation of Giles Foden's novel of the same name, director Kevin MacDonald creates an episodic and sometimes meandering story involving palace intrigues, adultery, British interference in Ugandan affairs and the famous raid on Entebbe, where the airline passengers hijacked by Palestinians were rescued by Israeli commandos. Some of this is supported by solid performances by Kelly Washington as one of Amin's wives and Simon McBurney as a British diplomat. But it still lacks the force of a more straightforward narrative.
As if to mirror the squirrelly storytelling, MacDonald and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (who's worked on many Dogme films) adopt a herky-jerky camera style, which, along with fussy editing, actually manages the unlikely trick of diluting Whitaker's performance. Too often we want to stare into that titanic, crazy face, only to have our attention diverted to McEvoy's milky reaction. We don't need a stand-in for our shock and awe here -- Whitaker summons it quite effectively.