THE DEVIL’S DOUBLE REVIEW

Dominic Cooper has been around for a while now, appearing in plenty of big movies (Mamma Mia, Captain America) but up to now, hasn’t had a breakout role that has elevated him to proper ‘above the title’ status. Could The Devil’s Double, where he plays two roles, be the movie to do it for him? Well, it’s certainly a bold and memorable move..

Lee Tamahori’s movie looks at the life of Latif Yahia, an army lieutenant in Iraq in the late eighties. As if that wasn’t a heated enough setup already, Latif (Cooper) gets recruited – forcibly – to act as a body double for Uday Hussein, the eldest son of Saddam (also Cooper).

It’s a tantalising premise, and indeed a completely different look at Iraq than anything we’ve seen in the cinema before. Subtle, it is not. You may have seen the posters depicting Latif/Uday covered in gold, and whilst that doesn’t feature in the movie, it’s not far off. Clearly Tamahori was intent on showing the most debauched aspects of Hussein’s life, in a pretty debauched and intense way. And it’s certainly well done – there is absolutely no illusion to the extent of Uday’s menace and full-on evil. I thought it was refreshing in how blatant it is – no suggesting, no hinting, just full-blown craziness. Sometimes it does over-emphasise without any real need, but at no point do you feel any sympathy for Uday, so this depiction can’t be seen as anything less than spot on.

Latif, sucked into the lifestyle of seemingly limitless wealth, girls and violence, is clearly intended to provide a sense of perspective for the whole thing – the problem being however, that his character doesn’t have a lot of range. Uday is an extreme, despicable character expertly played by Cooper, but there is little to Latif that makes him that interesting. You’re a lot more interested in the overall story than Latif himself, and I felt it was a bit of a missed opportunity here. Had Tamahori spent a little more time on developing Latif as a person than a plot device, the movie might have been a lot more potent.

As it stands though, there’s much to like. As mentioned Cooper throughs himself into the roles and he really does cement his status as a star here – without him, the film would be severely lacking and in danger of being a complete dud. It probably won’t be the movie that makes him an A-List star, but it’s a great example of his talent and expert casting. Tamahori proves himself to be more than adept when it comes to visceral filmmaking with a film that could have been extremely crass in the wrong hands. There’s no shortage of politically charged movies around these days, so we can only welcome ones that take a different approach than just depicting war – so with that in mind, The Devils Double is a unique and very interesting movie – albeit one that could have been a lot deeper.