Great acting, horrible filming

Rating: 6/10 (14 April 2007)

I was enticed into the story of this movie because I had only knew the basics of the acts Amin had done, and I was interested in seeing a closer look at how he was a dictator, and I was anticipating seeing how they'd portray such a vicious dictator. Forest Whitaker has a great performance, and my friends who never heard of him before thought that he was actually from Uganda. As I said I loved the story and Forests's acting BUT the directing and camera work on this movie was HORRENDOUS! I'm in a Grade 12 video class at my school, and we have better camera work then this movie's. The pan's and zooms were jumpy, the camera would quickly go right, stop, then quickly jolt right again. Same goes with zooms: zoom in, stop, zoom in, stop, zoom in, stop, quick zoom out. Than on top of these horrible zooms and pans there were also some unnecessary ones, for example one part where Idi Amin and the Doc are talking there's a terrible zoom to Amin's hand, it's not a smooth zoom, and the hand/arm isn't even centered when it stops. These technical aspects ruined the movie for me, cause I thought I had finally gotten away from terrible camera work when I passed Video10.