Premise: A Scottish doctor accidentally becomes the closest confidant of Idi Amin.
This movie is mainly remembered as the movie that won Forrest Whitaker his Oscar. And it was a dominant win. He won every award that year. No one argued with it. What interests me the most is how it's the rare case of reverse category fraud. Normally, lead roles will get bumped down to supporting roles for the Oscars where they have a better chance to win (See: Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl or Viola Davis for Fences). Occasionally though, there's a performance that's really a supporting performance but is so dominant that it gets called a lead and wins the Oscar anyway. Denzel Washington for Training Day is my favorite example of this. Ethan Hawke is the lead of that movie. Washington is the lead antagonist but still a supporting character overall. No one really cared though. He was very prominent in the film and it's a powerhouse performance. Whitaker's Idi Amin is a supporting role. Hilariously, James McAvoy was submitted as a supporting character in a number of places (The same switcharoo happened to Rooney Mara in Carol as well, I think). But Whitaker is the performance that makes the movie, so he ran as a lead and won anyway. I can't really argue with that. I'm not watching this movie for James McAvoy. Frankly, I forgot he was in the movie until I started it.
Whitaker is great in this movie. The expected move for this movie would be to show Amin's moral fall; begin early with him as an idealogue and watch as absolute power corrupts him absolutely. Instead, the movie opts to start well past that. Amin is bad from the start. It becomes about revealing how bad he is. Every scene with him is tense, because he's right on the edge of exploding. He hears more than people think and is always calculating.
The rest of the movie is more forgettable. It felt like they were scrambling for a plot around this strong central performance. I didn't care nearly as much about McAvoy's character's journey. I like McAvoy. He just doesn't have the most interesting character. That's the one problem with a performance like Whitaker's. We only see his character through the eyes of another person and I always wanted more of him.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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