Strong characters and historical basis make this great

Rating: 9/10 (31 July 2014)

Im not old enough to remember, and was almost entirely ignorant to (until I watched this film and then researched afterwards) the tragedies that happened in Uganda in the seventies.
James Mcavoy puts in another good performance as the narrator and main character Garrigan, a Scottish medical graduate wanting to get away from home- something I can relate to fairly well. So he travels to Uganda to become a local GP, but by chance he runs into the new ruler Idi Amin, and they immediately make an impression on one another so strong that Garrigan is invited to become the dictators private doctor, and ends up having a key role in Amin's regime.
Forest Whittaker, as you've probably heard already is spectacular in his role as Amin, one of the greatest performance I have ever seen. The film is so good at what it does, showing the regime from Garrigan's perspective, that I even believed Amins regime was the right thing for Uganda for about half of the film.
The weakest area of the film to me is the finale, there is one particular scene near the end that contains a minor but crucial plot hole, which dropped the perfect illusion the film had created up to then and stops me giving this full marks.
Definitely worth a watch, 9/10