Curtailing the documentary style format that allowed for an interaction with non-actors, Sacha Baron Cohen is somewhat more restrained in this conventionally made, but no less hilarious comedy. Probably his broadest film to date, here he plays a guy more akin to a Will Ferrell character than Bruno or Borat. A bit of a bollocks, he's somehow still likeable.
Cohen is General Aladeen of the fictitious African nation of Waadeya. Ruling with an iron fist, he is blatantly developing weapons of mass destruction and is subsequently summoned to New York to address the UN. When he's screwed over by his right hand man Tamir (an underused Kingsely) and replaced with a clueless lookalike while in Manhattan, he must figure out a way of returning to his illustrious role before he speaks to the world via the UN. Along the way he meets the liberal Zoey, played by Anna Faris (looking scarily like Elijah Wood), and an unlikely romance soon blossoms.
The Dictator is very very silly, and actually borders on slapstick a couple of times. But Cohen was smart; he knew that there's no way a character like this can work if he's not utterly ridiculous. Plus, you can get away with an awful lot more when your ostensibly evil lead is thicker than a drunken Rihanna tweet. The plot that surrounds him is simplistic and set-up purely for laughs, which isn’t a problem when said laughs come consistently - which they do. There is rarely a lull and the vast majority of the jokes hit, and hit hard.
Whether or not the switch back to a conventional style of execution for Cohen and director Charles (he's behind Bruno and Borat too) was going to work was always going to be questionable, but they approached this touchy subject matter with exactly the right idea - to completely and utterly take the piss. There are genuinely sharp moments in the script too, with a speech towards the end, while hardly rousing, making its point without sidetracking the humour that preceded it.
Ballsy and frequently hilarious. Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles have produced another winner here.