15, 125 mins


Two heavyweight champions square up this week with serious hopes of winning an Oscar. In the blue corner is Will Smith, still hurting terribly over his failure to scoop Best Actor (or even Best Biceps) for his sizzling footwork in Ali. This year he is Chris Gardner, a humble salesman with a thumping big dream. In the red corner lurks Forest Whitaker, an Oscar rookie, but a racing certainty for a seat at the feast. He not only plays Idi Amin, the most celebrated lunatic in African history, he is half-convinced that he actually is him.

There’s a doomy symmetry about this lopsided bout. Both fighters play real-life characters in slippery new fictions. Both men are obsessed with shaping destiny. But they are as evenly matched as David and Goliath. Kevin Macdonald’s terrific account of the rise and fall of Amin knocks Gabriele Muccino’s cobble-licking melodrama through the ropes.

The Last King of Scotland is as gloriously shambolic as its unpredictable star. Moments of trigger-happy tension can dissolve into farce in an instant. A single loose joke can cost a dozen lives. Whitaker’s meaty general weighs in at 20-odd stone. His charisma floods the screen. I’ve never seen an actor take every single scene by the throat. It’s not an exercise in power. It’s pure force of nature. The film is at the actor’s total mercy. The unbearable pleasure is not knowing if Amin will tickle or squeeze.

Amazingly, Whitaker was not the director’s immediate choice to play the tartan despot. I can’t imagine who could possibly do it better. He steams into every public rally like a human geyser, spouting tribal wisdom or pure rubbish. He fixes friends and foes with his sleepy left eye while the other pings around like a loose marble. It’s a gigantic performance by Whitaker, and a masterclass in how to terrify with charm.

The naive, infatuated narrator is Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), a plucky young Scottish doctor who becomes horribly entangled in the President’s grisly legacy after he breaks his wrist in a collision with a cow. You could eat the atmosphere when McAvoy impulsively plucks a gun from the President’s holster and puts a bullet into the howling beast. The film is littered with these nerve-shredding moments.

But Amin is ecstatic with his new Scottish friend, and Garrigan is green enough to hop on his bandwagon. Macdonald wisely junks most of the back-story in Giles Foden’s novel (on which the film is based) to focus on the precarious chemistry. Within hours Garrigan is plucked from the bleak village hospital where he dispenses aid, and railroaded into Amin’s charmed circle in Kampala. Money is crammed into his pockets and cars are put at his disposal. The swish apartment in the immaculate presidential compound dissolves any guilty doubts about his preposterous new post as Uganda’s Minister for Heath.

McAvoy seems unfeasibly young for this crucial role but his reckless ego chimes all too ominously with the feral, childlike monster Whitaker lovingly sculpts. The two characters bond like blood brothers at state-sponsored orgies. Jealous ministers and chilly security chiefs watch the privileged new stooge like stony sphinxes. Simon McBurney’s velvet spook from the British Foreign Office delivers a wonderful cameo as he tries to pry into the secrets of their increasingly bizarre friendship.

You know Amin’s sanity is as stable as a house of cards when he slips on a kilt and conducts a choir of gospel singers through You Take the High Road. The inevitable car smash is only ever a heartbeat away, but there’s an intoxicating and percussive rhythm to the film that whisks the drama forward.

Even Garrigan can’t fail to notice the sinister warning signs. Judges and key politicians go “missing”. Supporters of the deposed ex-president Milton Obote are rounded up and murdered. Amin’s outrageous tests of loyalty get more elaborate and fiendish as his paranoia grows. Garrigan realises that he’s put too much faith in his privileges when a rash affair with Amin’s third wife, Kay (Kerry Washington), goes badly wrong.

This is where Macdonald’s film eventually parts company with reality, but it seems strangely fitting, given the President’s mental health. There’s a nihilistic and unmistakeable whiff of Apocalypse Now about the last wild reel, and the carnage left over by the Israeli raid on Entebbe airport. Some might find the surreal and brutal eloquence hard to swallow. But this is a cracking way to stake an award-worthy claim.

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