What happens when, in a movie about lookalikes, you are watching the actor playing the two roles act like his lookalike, and he is able to make you truly believe that he is acting? Didn’t get it? Yeah, well that’s how awesomely well Dominic Cooper has played the two roles in the highly entertaining movie The Devil’s Double.
The movie is supposedly a biopic about Saddam Hussein’s crazier-than-Vindoo Dara Singh-on-coke son, Uday Hussein and his body double Latif Yahia. We say “supposedly” because there is an entire section of media reports saying how the original Yahia’s story might be masala-fied version of reality. Be what it may, but even if 30% of what is depicted in the movie is true, this guy deserves to be made a movie about.
The Devil’s Double is a story is told from the viewpoint of Latif Yahia, much like in The Last King of Scotland and Dr. Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy). Yahia is pulled out of the military and asked by Uday Hussein to become his body double. In spite of his refusal, under torture and threat to his family, Yahia is coerced into becoming the fiday. He is introduced to all the comforts and luxuries he would have as Uday’s ‘brother’ and made to undergo surgical procedures to ensure their resemblance is as near perfect as possible. He is taught the talk, the walk, the clothes and the hair that he is supposed to present to the outside world. Once the transformation is complete, what begins is a journey filled with madness, incessant murders, sexual debauchery and even more madness.
Dominic Cooper in The Devil's Double
The real Uday Hussein was known for his sometimes unprovoked killings and even more so for his insatiable sexual appetite. A psychopath laden with power and money, Uday Hussein had no qualms in abducting school girls from the streets to make them his sex slave, use his posse to dispose of the bodies of women he would rape and kill and even pick up brides from their own marriage venues. All of this is portrayed extremely well in the movie and Dominic Cooper (for those of you who have difficulty in placing him, he played Howard Stark in Captain America) does exceptionally well in making the audience feel absolute hatred towards Uday Hussein and at the same time force them to feel sorry for Latif Yahia.
The movie progresses in a similar tone for quite some time until Latif falls for one of Uday’s girls, Sarrab (the French actress Ludivine Sagnier) and decides to get out of it all. This is followed by Uday’s people trying to hunt Latif down, a lot of running, chasing, yada yada yada…till the end.
Now here’s where the movie doesn’t work so well for us; first one is a minor one – the role of Saddam Hussein. Although he has a collective screen time of less than 5 minutes, Philip Quast as Saddam is a big letdown. There was so much more intensity the director, Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day), could have added to the role.
The second, and the major disappointment – although we are impressed with Cooper’s acting skills, we fail to understand why they couldn’t bring in a real Iraqi to play the part. Try as hard as he might, Cooper’s British accent and mannerisms consistently surfaces and breaks the Iraqi image he is trying to portray – remember how annoying Dev Patel was in Slumdog Millionaire?
But in spite of its arguably dismissible flaws, the movie is worth a watch.
Rating: 6/10
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