The Dictator

“The Dictator” does for Sacha Baron Cohen what “The Love Guru” did for Mike Myers: Reveal that this sharp comedian is capable of great folly. The movie isn’t bad enough to be a career killer, the way “Guru” forced Myers into hiding. But the latest collaboration between Cohen and director Larry Charles proves the formula they created with “Borat” and then started to milk dry with “Bruno” has finally run out of juice. “The Dictator” is populated entirely by actors (there’s only one brief scene that appears ambush style). The actor plays Admiral General Omar Aladeen, the mad despot of the North African country Wadiya, which is rich with oil and struggling to start a nuclear weapons program. Aladeen agrees to visit the “devil’s nest” of America with his brother (Ben Kingsley) to address the United Nations, but he’s stripped of his power after landing in New York. While plotting a way to regain his throne, he takes a job at an eco-friendly grocery story run by a cheerful activist (Anna Faris), who gradually falls for the unusually blunt foreigner. Like Cohen’s previous films, “The Dictator” exploits racism and xenophobia for laughs, flinging our deep-seated prejudices back in our faces for humor. But the approach isn’t nearly as effective when it’s actors reading lines instead of real people accidentally revealing their own biases. Every genuine laugh and creative gag in “The Dictator” is negated by a cheap or ugly joke – obvious jabs on stereotypes and racism that smack of self-importance, as if Cohen were preaching to us, and radiate a mean-spiritedness that “Borat” and “Bruno” avoided. It’s telling that the biggest laugh in the entire film comes in the opening shot – a title card dedicating the picture to the memory of Kim Jong Il. The rest of “The Dictator,” sadly, has no clothes.