Review – The Last King of Scotland

Sorry, but after Hotel Rwanda and Catch a Fire I’ve gotten used to black actors cast as protagonists in movies about Africa. I’m not ready to go back to the traditional Hollywood formulation that it always has to be about the white folks. Here the Caucasian protagonist is even more contrived than usual, a Scotsman who graduates from med school and ends up – by random choice – working at a clinic in Uganda. After a chance encounter with the newly-minted dictator, our hero ends up as Idi Amin’s personal physician. At first the job’s pretty cushy, but eventually it turns into a “heart of darkness” experience as the world starts to collapse around Amin and his hangers-on. Forest Whitaker does an award-winning job as Amin despite not really looking all that much like him. Though this isn’t a terrible movie, I think something much better could have been made out of this time and place in African history. At the very least I’m still waiting for someone to do something about Amin acknowledging that – as terrible as he was – he was reviled in the West less because of his psychotic leadership style (he wasn’t any more cruel than leaders in many other countries across the globe before, during or since the 1970s) and more because he seized assets from white-owned businesses. Mildly amusing