After watching The Devil’s Double, I wondered, “What if an actually Iraqi actor was cast in the dual role of Latif Yahia/Uday Hussein?” Then I wondered, “What if they cast Zac Efron in that role?”
Casting Englishman Dominic Cooper in the role of Uday Hussein, sadistic son of Saddam Hussein and his body double Latif Yahia brings me back to seeing Sir Ben Kingsley as Mahatma Gandhi — but at least Kingsley looked the part. With Cooper, he needed a little bit more than a shoddy accent and a porno mustache to achieve the full look of two real-life people who had a destructive good twin/bad twin relationship — he needed a little bit more gestation time in the Hollywood uterus.
The movie follows the abusive, violent, and unbearable escapades of Uday and Latif during the first Gulf War. Uday is a crazy-ass mofo and his dad isn’t too fond of him. He’s like the screw-up son who parties, wears expensive clothes, does coke and recreationally picks up women off the street and then abuses them. He’s a real winner, don’t you think? Instead of doing the “Hollywood” thing and trying to prove himself to his dad, he hires Latif, a dude he knew from childhood, to be his body double to do the things he doesn’t want to do — the socially responsible stuff. The movie, based on real people and stories takes us behind the scenes of the “life of political decoys” and it should be a great “HOW’D THEY DO THAT?!” story, but ends up being gratuitous, explicit and over-the-top.
Cooper is a great and attractive young actor — which is one of the main problems with this film. After every great scene he did, I giggled like a doofus and said, “He’s Tony Stark’s dad!” or “He was in the horrendous movie adaptation of Mamma Mia!” — and that’s a damn shame. He didn’t, as they say, “inhabit” the role. He was just “playing” the role of this psychopath who makes everyone take off their clothes at a party and dance with their tittyballs and schlongs hanging out — he’s not really “being.” He is certainly no Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort. Then again, who can achieve that kind of brilliance?!
To Cooper’s credit, he did what he could in tackling such challenging and demanding roles. It’s like The Patty Duke Show on meth. It’s too bad he acted so much that you could tell he was wearing his “I AM A SERIOUS ACTOR” mask with his dapper Scarface-worthy outfits.
My harsh critique on Cooper may be the result of me not being able to wrap my head around the casting of the role. Why not just cast an Iraqi? Do they think we won’t notice? Perhaps the Hollywood casting machine thinks that culturally blind casting will be like Gwyneth Paltrow in a role that calls for an English accent. If they do it enough, the actor will eventually THINK s/he is the ethnicity they were cast in. It’s kind of like reverse method acting: taking what they do on screen and applying it to real life. So does this mean Cooper will become an Iraqi? (Consider that the end of my soapbox tirade.)
Nonetheless, Cooper is the core of the movie and, unfortunately there isn’t enough traction in portraying Uday and Latif. It’s distracting and makes the entire movie more of a feature-length caricature (more so Uday — unless he was REALLY that psycho) rather than a movie about real people in a significant time in history.
The Devil’s Double is currently playing in select theaters.
- Excited
- Fascinated
- Amused
- Disgusted
- Sad
- Angry
