This synopsis tells you that the story is only ostensibly about Idi Amin's dictatorship, Uganda, or 20th-century African politics. The screenwriters Jeremy Brock and Peter Morgan, adapting Giles Foden's work of fiction, have done no more than throw a native cloth over a moth-eaten theatrical warhorse. When Nicholas is zipping around Kampala in his convertible Mercedes coupé (a present from Amin) in a vain effort to save his paramour from her mad husband, you realize that the poor woman might as well be tied to a log in a sawmill. And the way the Ugandan doctor lets himself be taken by Amin's guards so that Nicholas may escape with the (gentile and non-Israeli) Air France hostages is a classic piece of sacrificial noble savagery, as antique and termite-tunneled as a wooden Mohican. These incidents lead to such scathing thoughts as, "It takes only three deaths — out of an estimated 300,000 for which Amin was responsible — for a Scotsman to learn his lesson."

The underlying problem is that despite being "inspired by real people and events," the narrative has been shaped as a redemptive romance. Nicholas is tempted with the things of this world by Idi Amin, falls, and then must undergo a physical ordeal in order to earn his way back into the congregation of the good. At the most basic level, and despite the novelistic concision with which the director Kevin Macdonald establishes points of character and setting, it's just plain corny to have Nicholas involved in every damn thing that happens. It isn't in itself a problem that the story is worked out allegorically (never more obviously than when Nicholas unsuccessfully runs after the bus on which the symbolically named Mrs. Merrit is decamping from the country). But it is a problem that, despite the allegorical characterization and the romance structure, the makers seem to think the movie is a revelatory depiction of Idi Amin's rule. That's not how they've structured their story, however, and as a result The Last King of Scotland is essentially the same movie as The Devil Wears Prada. (I've run across one other reviewer who noticed this.)

Forest Whitaker's supporting turn as Idi Amin is thus like Meryl Streep's as Miranda Priestly, a fictional version of Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour — they're both flourishy tempters of the central characters and no more. Of course, the historical figure of Idi Amin offers Whitaker more range than Streep had. Whitaker's dictator is a hearty peasant, with a big laugh, and his towering bulk can seem babyish, when, for instance, Nicholas uses a pouf and a baseball bat to coax a pachydermal fart out of him to ease gastric pain. But it can also be threatening, when he focuses his gaze with a frightening power of intuition — being unhinged appears to have made him preternaturally canny about other people's motives. This Amin is a bounteous condottiere who also knows instinctively that it helps an absolute ruler to keep his stewards off balance and at odds with each other. At the same time, his position allows him to be utterly sincere; he doesn't have to hide the fact that he identifies his country's good with whatever he happens to want. But he's also a hard-working modern politico, stumping to cheering crowds. The movie's Amin thus has (undeveloped) suggestions of Mephistopheles, Falstaff, Machiavelli's Prince, Willie Stark, and an Othello with the amorality of Iago. Whitaker is such a resourceful, present actor, that, despite their baleful effects, Amin's changes of mood avoid giving you horror-movie creeps, which is a miracle considering how tacky the narrative structure is.