Film Review | The Devil's Double

Okay let’s get this out of the way first so I can tell you just how awful The Devil’s Double truly is.

Yes, it’s fun to watch if you’re Maltese and yes, just as it was fun to see key parts of Malta and Gozo transposed onto the fantasy setting of HBO TV series Game of Thrones, you will probably get plenty mileage out of it being used as a stand-in for Hussein-era Baghdad in this thriller, based on a somewhat embellished memoir by Latif Yahia, who was forced to act as body double for Saddam Hussein’s deranged hedonist of a firstborn son Uday.

You’ll probably also spot a few friends if you’re eagle-eyed enough, so it should make for a fun night out. Of course the film itself would still have to be endured and unfortunately, director Lee Tamahori’s glossy bit of violent hokum doesn’t even come close to being a dramatically satisfying feature in its own right… never mind that with its MTV aesthetic, a reliance on stock footage to telegraph truly important historical events of the time – namely, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait – and a plot structure that isn’t so much a story as a tediously repetitive collage of Uday’s ‘shocking’ behaviour, it actually grows to mirror its subject matter… in terms of moral shallowness and bad taste, anyway.

Understandably, the one feature of the film that really got tongues wagging amongst audiences and critics is Dominic Cooper’s dual performance as Uday and Latif – which sounds like an impressive feat on paper and one which the quietly rising British actor lives up to with impressive panache.

His Uday, with his bulging out gap-teeth and a squeaky voice, is all the scarier for sounding like Goofy while meting out horrific acts that the ever-indignant, ever-seething Latif has to not just endure but also, reluctantly, endorse.

Perhaps Cooper is merely tapping into an essential actorly narcissism, but both characters feel distinct from each other, and their pseudo-relationship – or, rather, the hints of it that appear through the fog of violence and preening decadence – actually (tragically) betrays just how much potential the story would have had in better hands.

For it is a film piled with easily avoidable errors. One of these is a misjudged love story between Latif and Uday’s chief concubine Sarrab, played by Ludivine Sagnier. The alluring French actress – known for her laudable performances in Swimming Pool, 8 Women and Moliere – is barely recognisable under layers of caked-on makeup and an assortment of garish wigs which, while certainly appropriate for Uday’s nightclub harems, seem to be an apt symbol of the film’s tendency to suppress any real talent in the interest of cheap, tacky exploitation-drama.

Before being lumped with turkeys like the sequel to Vin Diesel testosterone-fest XXX and the uninspiring Bond film Die Another Day, Tamahori directed the superlative Maori drama Once Were Warriors.

It’s quite sad to see him suffer yet another indignity with this, essentially ‘Scarface in Baghdad’. But it would be difficult to see him as just a victim though. With source material like this, one expects a slice of truly dark magic.

What we get instead, however, has more of an affinity with the video work of another self-declared ‘superstar’, who also visited our shores.