The Last King of Scotland

Africa, cradle of civilisation, land of exotism and mystery and beauty.... and dictatorship, and murder, and blood money, and a lot of things, matter of fact the old continent is still struggling, because "the new continent" and the one above are still making it a rule to give shelter to it's dictator and leave it in it's virgin state, save for the natural ressources of course.

"The Last king of Scotland" is such a movie, it's about Ugunda, a country not many of you have heard about, and it's center is the life and times of General Idi Amin the man who ruled the country
with an iron fist and an undeniable charisma seen through western eyes.

Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) is a young Scottish doctor fresh out of med school, he has daddy issues and don't want to end up like father in the classy monotonous life of village practice, so he throws his dice on the world globe, and ends up in Ugunda, where he helps a humanitarian doctor to cure the needy in a remote Ungandan Village, his arrival conicides with the successful coup d'etat staged by General Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) , a series of events lead Nicholas to become a close adviser to Amin, and to enter his life of ultimate luxury, unlimited power and raw violence beyond the understanding of a Scottish upper middle class kid who came to look for adventure.

The movie is shot in warm hues, and a great cinematography, again through western eyes, it starts in the exotic safari Africa with exotism and mystery, then slowly to "bloody money " Africa where nobody wants to live, and the truth is lost between those two, in a mere cinematographic point of view the movie is good, but you can't help the feeling of absorbing a biased message, it's speaking about real people having real lives, it has a somewhat honest point of view in the sense of Nicholas's indulgence of Idi Amin's cruel behaviours is a metaphor for the whole western indulgence of African dictatorship, i mean who did provide dictators with arms (see our review of "lord of war), with tax havens, with swiss accounts, and sometimes even of a favourable media coverage, far from me to indulge dictatorship and killings, because i know what it's like to live under a dictatorship, but this bloody coin has two sides, and you can't just focus on one, because i think he is just paying the price of his political stands during "Operation Thunderbolt".

Back to cinema, Whithaker's acting is amazing, he could absorb and channel the raw magnetism and undeniable charisma of Amin and won all the major awards that year, on the other side James McAvoy is really good in his interpretation of a candid doctor, who came to Africa to seek adventure, and ends up learning that "everything there is real" in the words of Amin.

Being an African myself, i can't judge this movie without thinking about the broken promises my contient endured, an how deceived it was, from the early days of Ben Mhidi, Nasser and Lumuba, a big African Festival is happening in Algeria these days the second "Panaf", the first was in 69, between the two is a painful story of an extinction of a holy fire of aspiration for billions of people, which got reduced to the distance between any African capital, and Geneva, and they don't even need that now, they have the internet