Film Review: "The Devil's Double" (2011).

"Sex... Power... Too much money... What do you get a 'Prince' that has everything?" This is The Devil's Double. This Belgian-Dutch film directed by Lee Tamahori, written by Michael Thomas. The film centres on Latif, an Iraqi soldier, who is forced to become the body double of Saddam Hussein's notorious playboy son Uday. With his family's life at stake, he now learns to walk and talk like the 'Black Prince'.

By early February 2010, Dominic Cooper, Philip Quast, Ludivine Sagnier, Mimoun Oaïssa, Raad Rawi, Mem Ferda, and Dar Salim were cast in a film about Uday Hussein and Latif Yahia, with Tamahori as director and penned by Thomas. At the same time, principal photography commenced, and wrapped in early April. Filming took place throughout Malta and Jordan.

The film stars Cooper, Quast, Sagnier, Oaïssa, Rawi, Ferda, and Salim. Cooper's performance as Latif Yahia and Uday Hussein is impressive, creating two distinct characters, one of whom eerily mimics the other. While the film feels deeply flawed, Cooper is worth the price of admission. All due praise to Cooper. It should have been more. 

Beyond the less-than-exquisite visual effects and battles, what is most interesting about the story is its protagonist: a bodyguard who turns into the double of the Black Prince. Here, as in all of Tamahori's recent films, this sense of hopeless fixity renders unconvincing any hope for human agency. The film is not the gratifying come-back picture for a justifiably once revered filmmaker that one feels churlish harboring certain reservations. There is beauty in The Devil's Double but it is impersonal, distant and ghostly. The New Zealand filmmaker has never been more rigorous. An anything but excellent historical drama doesn't quite show Tamahori's broad range of gifts and skill. The film unsuccessfully swings like a pendulum between stillness and action, an occasionally jarring mix of David Lean-like panoramas with intimate character study. But ultimately it's a dull and plodding presentation of an interesting period of Iraq history. The film, much like the similarly overblown but handsomely mounted Lawrence of Arabia (1962), is an epic with a cipher in its point position. A not-so fine example of the Tamahori style. A unimpressive precision of narrative in both scripting and imagistic storytelling. Though not as overall impressive as Once Were Warriors, the film, Tamahori's latest is unsurprisingly ignored by critics and audiences alike for its dull commercial visuals and unimpressive production values. Despite its short length, it always drags. Tamahori apparently considers ''power isn't everything'' an original and profound message. By ignoring its massive, toxic, nuclear-fallout shortcomings, it finds its way to the hallowed status of camp classic. Characterization and plot go out the window. By the third hour everything is out of control. Although, the film offers certainly a fresh perspective on one of the Middle East's most brutal dictators. Hats off to Tamahori for taking a controversial topic and turning it into a tolerable film in a cinematic landscape full of the tiring sequels, reboots and remakes.

Simon says The Devil's Double receives: