The Last King of Scotland
Films are a story telling art form. Each creative piece is there to drive you into the characters and their lives, whether or not it is good or not. While you may believe that films recently are money making schemes, the crew and writers behind it mostly have an agenda to tell a tale. It is difficult then, to create a film that revolves around real figures, especially when you have to tell the truth and make it entertaining. From celebrities such as Ray Charles to dictators such as Downfall, year after year these spellbinding movies on actual people are produced. Some don’t do so well, glossing other actual facts in order to present one side as super and shiny. Others brilliant excavate the grit and brutality of either side.
Luckily, Kevin McDonald’s 2006 thriller, The Last King of Scotland stays mainly in the latter.
The Last King of Scotland stars James McAvoy and Forest Whittaker. It depicts the tale of Ugandan president Idi Amin, the infamous and murderous dictator. McAvoy plays fictional Nicolas Garrigan, a Scottish Doctor who goes to Africa for work. While he is working in the rundown areas, he runs into Amin and is soon befriended and upheled by the President. Enjoying the highlife with money and gifts, Garrigan soon becomes Amin’s confidant. That is until the president’s true colours start coming through. Using events that really happened and slicing it with fiction to give a scarily stark movie.
Kevin McDonald’s movie is a clear triumph of acting skill. Earning his Academy Award, Forrest Whitaker, movies once gentle giant, transforms into the monster of Amin. He plays this child like adult who has enough charm to convince a whole nation while murdering his opposition underneath the beaming smile. Whitaker has studied this man and accurate portrays a ruthless man who wants a nation to support him by punching them in the face and telling them to get in line. Whitaker does not hold back, he brings life to a tyrant by layering him with complex evils and naivities. Here, Whittaker gives the performance of his career much like Bruno Ganz did with Hitler; the vulnerabilities of a maniac.
He is upheld by a sterling performance by James McAvoy who features as Garrigan. While he may be made up for the purpose of the movie Garrigan acts as a social conscious through the movie. Here he represents blind faith in a leader, turning an eye for a friend and ultimately, the impending panic and shock in the acts that have occurred while he was ignorant. While many would question to inclusion of Garrigan, here it feels like a critical look on the Western world and their stance during the killings. It causes you to question, to think and to learn.
The Last King of Scotland is ultimately a movie of violence. McDonald doesn’t hold back on the gore and brutality of mass killings in Uganda. It is a bleak movie. It is film that is shot almost guerrilla style and is doused in disgusting but rightly provoking images. Heavy on political thriller and the horrible mass genocides, Whitaker leads an on point cast in a terrible tale of events that unfortunately, happened.
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