Another film in which James McAvoy plays a pretty unsympathetic character who the audience is ostensibly supposed to identify with.
Anyway the story is: Dr. James McAvoy goes to Uganda after he's qualified as a doctor to avoid having to work in his fathers practice. When he gets there he has a gratuitous sex scene and then gets employed as Idi Amin's personal physician. Forest Whitaker's performance as the brutal dictator is pretty impressive displaying charisma and crazed psychopathy side by side and totally convincingly. The film moves along nicely and gets the tone about right (though I have to say at points, there's a touch of the BA advert about some of the scenes). There's no flinching from some necessarily horrific scenes towards to the end, but it's hard to feel sympathy for the doctors predicament as he accrues more power with apparently no thought for the consequences or awareness of what's going on in the country around him. I'm guessing this is a weakness of the script rather than the fact that James McAvoy is somehow inherently unsympathetic. Or maybe it's just me.
IMDB
Incidentally, what kind of twat would think it's a good idea to make a t-shirt of Idi Amin? Presumably the same kind of twat who'd call their company sweatshop productions with apparently no hint of irony or any suggestion that their shirts aren't made in sweatshops.
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