The Last King Of Scotland [DVD] [2006]

Set in 1970, this film follows the adventures of newly-qualified doctor Nicholas Garrigan (played by James McAvoy) as he seeks something racier than following his father into the family practice. More or less at random he picks work as an overseas medical officer in Uganda. On the bus into the country he declares, on sighting his first monkey, "if we had monkeys in Scotland we'd probably deep-fry them" before breaking his journey to make jiggy-jiggy with the first local girl he speaks to.
Upon arrival at the mission hospital - a day late - he soon finds that the heavy clinical workload is both emotionally overwhelming and not to his taste. A chance meeting with newly-installed president Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) leads to an offer he can hardly refuse to become the president's personal physician. However he soon finds that he is in over his head and has to turn for help to the bourgeois types in the British establishment that he had come to Africa to avoid.
James McAvoy's character is a thrill-seeking charmer who smokes, drinks and services his libido with as many attractive women as he can. Both he and Idi Amin see something of themselves in each others eyes, though Idi Amin wins hands down in the psychopathy stakes. Forest Whitaker plays the fickle egotist brilliantly and avoids the pantomime psycho act in favour of a more believable and even sympathetic character - the film shows that he's not just being paranoid, they really are out to get him!
On the down side, Dr Garrigan at times felt like a gap-yearing member of the ipod generation who had been time-warped into a Graham Greene story. Would a young doctor in 1970 be so naive and reckless?
This film has great scenery and characters and accurately depicts the clothes, buildings and vehicles of the time and place it is set. Well worth seeing more than once.

James McAvoy plays Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, who is fresh out of medical college in the 1970s. Nicholas thoroughly dreads following in his dour father's footsteps, a life to be spent working in a Scottish general practice. Driven by the urge to get away, he spins a globe and randomly stabs a finger, which lands on the sub-Saharan country of Uganda.

There Nicholas meets the newly self-installed president of the country, General Idi Amin. During a meeting between the two, where Nicholas treats an injury picked up by Amin during an accident, the dictator finds out that Nicholas is Scottish. Prompted by his love of all things Highland, Amin sweeps the young and impressionable Scot into the inner circle of his government before Nicholas has time to consider the danger signs.

Gillian Anderson, who lays on a near fautless British accent not for the only time in her career, is sadly underused to the point of irrelevance. Playing a veteran health worker who has seen the likes of Amin before, she tries to warn Nicholas of the dangers of getting swept along by the dictator's charisma, but to no avail.

Forest Whitaker's performance as Amin is stellar. A kind of black Josef Stalin, he dominates every scene he's in, his moods swinging with paranoid sharpness and his trust shattering at so much as a perceived funny look from an underling.

Viewers should know that there are two extremely unpleasant scenes at the end of the film. These come as even more of a shock after Nicholas has spent so much of the story revelling in the Ugandan high-life, only becoming aware of his patron's evil excesses once they reach their worst depths.

The highlights of the film are, again, Forest Whitaker's Idi Amin, and the colour, music and tribal pageantry of Ugandan life, before the dictator's brutality brought the country to its knees, shown in all its glory.

I only learned after the fact that James McAvoy's character is entirely fictional. This is a shame because the film might have made a superb primer to the history, culture and personality of the region had The Last King Of Scotland shown life in Amin's government from the perspective from someone who had actually been there.

Nevertheless, this is a cut way, way above most of the dross that clutters the shelves of your local DVD store. Be prepared for the nastiness in the film's closing quarter, but by all means, don't overlook it.

The performance of Forest Whitaker left me speechless. There is SO MUCH I'd wish to say for it, but I'm lost for words! A chilling film about the 70's president of Uganda, the charmer-monster Idi Amin. As a story, it could easily stand for many of the developing world's dictators. James McAvoy was superb as Amin's physician portraying the naive, impressionable youth who gradually undergoes a transformation as he discovers the sinister reality behind his boss's charms. His extremely young looks stretch the credibility of such a boy having actually graduated from medical school, but his outstanding performance makes up for it.

Hard to watch at the end, with the brutality of Amin and his henchmen reaching monstrous proportions. But precisely because the movie was not filled with scenes of violence, but rather spread them out in gradual doses over the second half, escalating towards the end, that made them all the more harrowing. Again, as for Forest Whitaker, I cannot say enough for his performance, maybe simply that it was pure genius.