Paul Berman went to see the new film by the erstwhile Borat. He came away grudgingly impressed:
In the matter of dictator movies, I prefer Baron Cohen to, say, Walter Salles, the director of a movie about Che Guevara. The Dictator is anti-dictator. The film even makes a semi-profound point near the end by observing that, as of our own moment, the dreadful dictators of modern times have fallen—Qaddafi, Saddam, Cheney—and goes on to observe that, even so, dreadful dictatorships may not, in fact, be at an end: a subtle contradiction, a footnote to the End of History thesis. Then, too, the dictator observes that democracy is not much different from dictatorship, except for the parts that are better, and maybe democracy is a great thing, after all, even if it’s not perfect. This particular display of political nuance is not offered with any equivalent filmmaking nuance.
Baron Cohen’s technique is to stand up and lecture at us. Here is a film that is not about filmmaking. It’s a good lecture, though. I would even say that, politically speaking, Sacha Baron Cohen is—I hate to use this word, it ought to mean death to any artist—sound.
Joshua Keating counters:
Yes, the film includes some send-ups of American hypocrisy in the war on terror — there's a pretty good bit in which Aladeen sniffs at the outdated torture devices of his American captor including one that was "banned in Saudi Arabia for being too safe" — and most of the American characters are either Islamophobic rubes or patronizingly P.C. liberals, but it's not as if any of them are wrong in their perceptions of Aladeen. He's a violent, misogynistic, anti-Semitic ignoramus who has the real Osama bin Laden stashed in his palace's guest suite. The only ordinary Wadiyan citizen in the film, the body double also portrayed by Cohen, is a dumb peasant who drinks his own urine and has difficulty distinguishing between women and goats. Whose prejudices are we mocking here? Cohen even throws in a few Chinese and African caricatures for good measure. …
The best satire targets the powerful, bringing them down a few notches and deflating their bubbles of self-importance. But in the first Hollywood film to address last year's Arab uprisings, Cohen seems less interested in laughing with the people who live under the Qaddafis and Mubaraks of the world than at them.
The Dish 