The Devil's Double Review

   The Devil’s Double is a feverishly grisly picture, which rightly refuses to flinch away from the nightmarish violence and cruelty of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Dominic Cooper plays the role of Uday Hussein, Saddam’s depraved hobgoblin of a son, as well as the former school-mate with a striking physical resemblance to Uday recruited as a body double. Cooper certainly can’t be accused of phoning in the demanding dual performance, but nevertheless the characterisation falls a little flat. He does a fine job as Uday, unleashing an extroverted monstrousness that evokes the necessary sense of grandiose, psychopathic, freakishly childlike menace (in a truly twisted irony, the occasional appearance by Saddam himself makes him seem almost reasonable in comparison to Uday). The problem is that beyond morbid fascination, the character of Uday is not especially interesting; a spoilt, spiteful, bloodthirsty grotesque. There is nothing wrong with this (the filmmakers are working with painfully recent reality after all), but it does make it important that the portrayal of the double, Latif Yahia, is compelling enough to act as the centre of the film. However, little sense of Yahia as a person emerges; he is less a fascinating enigma than a frustratingly opaque nobody, who does little apart from brood for most of the running time. He seems to seesaw between notably disgusted but passive in the face of Uday’s evil, and reckless, almost suicidal defiance, including an underwhelming and unconvincing love affair with one of Uday’s favourite courtesans. He never seems to show fear, despite having every reason to dread reprisals against his family if his Satanic employer ever tires of him. This strange dichotomy between helplessness and heroism is doubtless due to the film being based on the real Yahia’s own recollections.

  The film’s weak centre is unfortunate, as its evocation of the gnawing pressure and institutional vileness of the Hussein years is savagely potent; Uday can be a cheerful hedonist in one scene, only to commit bloody murder in a fit of adolescent rage in another. Some of the grimmest moments of the film concern his sexual sadism, showing his relentless stalking of schoolgirls through the streets of Baghdad. But the awkward juxtaposition of real-life brutality and the odd action-movie implausibility (particularly in the final reel), deflates the film’s merit, leaving it’s frenzied efforts to shock and condemn lagging in the shadow of relatively more sober pieces like The Last King of Scotland.