PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 09/21/06)

Forest Whitaker has given a lot of extraordinary performances in his career, but none quite as high-voltage as his portrayal of the maniacal and, in his own mind at least, maniacally charming Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in this intense, sometimes hallucinatory, and often gruesome drama adapted from a novel by Giles Foden. The film's title refers to the honor Amin once bestowed on himself, on account of his defiance of Britain; the movie's other main character is a young Scottish doctor (James McAvoy, who also played that little faun feller in The Chronicles of Narnia), who, in a combination of dumb luck and catastrophically poor judgment, becomes Amin's personal physician.

Exclusive Photos With the Cast Toronto Film Festival 2006

The physician, Nicholas Garrigan, is Foden's fictional composite of several real-life figures in the real-world story of Amin's atrocious regime, and the film's screenwriters, Jeremy Brock and Peter Morgan, and director Kevin Macdonald (here making his fiction feature debut; his previous film, the harrowing Touching the Void, was a mix of documentary and dramatizations of actual events) employ a risky strategy with this character. The witness to all manner of blustering, feinting, paranoid, vengeful, and sadistic actions on Amin's part, Garrigan functions as a sort of audience surrogate; but Garrigan himself is so self-deluding, selfish, foolhardy (even going so far as to bed one of Amin's wives), and downright stupid that he's something of a turnoff. This is all to the point, of course, that the artists are making apropos Western involvement in African affairs. But it compromises the movie's dramatic immediacy at times. Never when Whitaker is onscreen, though. Often seemingly encased in a film of sweat, so hyperconscious of his larger-than-lifeness that he comes off as almost serene in his derangement, Whitaker's Amin is the kind of raging lunatic that only an actor who has made a specialty of quiet caginess could pull off so convincingly. It's great, and scary, to see Whitaker turn it up to 11 for once.

—Glenn Kenny