The Last King of Scotland

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a movie go from pretty good to pure crap with such a clear line of demarcation. About two-thirds of the way through, an implausible sex scene leads to one mounting implausibility after another, and what seemed like a serious examination of a real-life situation devolves into a senseless thriller. Kevin MacDonald certainly knows how to direct propulsively, as he showed with two previous documentaries, One Day in September (about terrorism at Munich Olympics in 1972), and Touching the Void (about a mountain-climbing expedition gone horribly awry), but here he repulsively drags his film through the most pointless genre conventions, just when it was getting to the point. Which was about a doctor fresh out of med school in Scotland, who finds himself in Uganda looking for adventure, and finds more than he bargained for when he bumps into Idi Amin at a car accident, and is thereafter seduced by the dictator who has just siezed power, into becoming first the strongman’s family physician and then his closest advisor. Forest Whitaker physically and emotionally inhabits the character of Amin, and deserves the Oscar he appears to be headed for, but James McAvoy is also good as the callow but appealing young medic. Just when the doctor’s tastes for adventure and high living have backed him into a moral quandary and a weighty dilemma, and we are wondering how he will extricate himself, he does something so incredibly stupid that neither the audience nor the movie can take him seriously thereafter, and he becomes a pawn of the preposterous plot and its offensive implications (we’re supposed to be getting our chills by following the escape of the white guy, while barely noticing as the black characters fall like dominoes.) Still, before it goes off the rails, the film does convey a sense of time and place and outsized personality, and poses an interesting moral puzzle, only to blast it off the screen in the race to an utterly unsatisfying denouement. (2006, Images, n.) *5+* (MC-74.)