Seen for the first time in November 2012.
I think I liked “The Dictator” more than the consensus of initial reactions. I thought there were many funny moments, despite a good bit of admittedly lazy humor. It was better than “Bruno,” which was more annoying than funny. But I didn’t laugh as much as I laughed at “Borat.” Though I wonder if I would still laugh at “Borat” if I saw it today.
Either way, “Borat” was something uniquely funny upon arrival, not just funnier than most other comedies, but so seemingly different as well that its difficult to rank as a comedy and not just as a funny aberrant form that exists outside of the comedy movie paradigm. Like if I ranked the top 5 movies of the first decade of the twenty first century, I’d tentatively include in some order that I have not determined: “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle,” “Zoolander,” “Super Troopers,” “Wet Hot American Summer,” “Observe and Report,” or maybe if I could only include half of a movie, I’d find a way to fit in the first third of “Superbad.” “Borat” is as consistently and thoroughly funny as many of these movies, but somehow it is just so different an entity from these movies it would never occur to me to think of it when drawing up that list.
“The Dictator” is a more traditional comedy. And on that score, it succeeds with plenty of laughs. It is, for example, much better than “Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” to which one might draw comparisons. “The Dictator” is unsurprisingly politically lazy and, though I love Anna Faris maybe more than any woman alive, a lot of the humor surrounding her character is hackishly lazy. And yet the repeated jokes of the “are you having a boy or an abortion” vein drew laughs from me. Grade B+.
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