When a movie trailer starts with clips of real speeches delivered by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, you would think the only direction to go is up, but Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator has a few low points to balance out the high points.
Cohen hasn’t been seen on the big screen since Bruno so The Dictator should be his triumphant return to the theaters, but I hope the movie delivers more comedy than the trailer or he might run into some box office trouble. The Dictator features Cohen as General Aladeen, the evil ruler of a fictional third-world country. When dealing with Cohen, it’s best to make fictional country so a few less people are offended, although offending people usually isn’t one of the comedian’s primary concerns.
In addition to John C. Reilly’s very thinly-veiled reference to a terrorist attack, we have Aladeen shooting people that are competing against him in a marathon, training women to shatter bricks with their breasts, and (my personal favorite) sleeping with Megan Fox, who trades her body for a handful of riches… but not rubies. After all, she’s not a Kardashian.
However, while all the scenes mentioned above are funny on their own, I don’t see how it all fits together, so I’m wondering if we’re going to actually get a funny movie or a string of individual funny skits that are tied together with a bunch of lameness between the laughs. I guess we’ll get to find out when The Dictator arrives in theaters on May 11, 2012.