As Amin, the American actor Forest Whitaker is extraordinary. He makes you see Amin’s charisma and cunning and understand the way in which he could (not that there’s any record he ever did) reach out and embrace a younger, more impressionable man and woo him with sexual opportunities and luxuries and fast cars, until the young fellow himself is all but a party to the activities of what Amin called the “State Research Bureau,” which seemed mostly to involve bayonet use in the presidential mansion basement. Whitaker also makes you feel quite a bit of Amin’s paranoia, dating from an assassination attempt and exacerbated by tribal animosities, that produced the high death count. Sweaty, physically imposing, wilting through his medal-festooned tunics, he seems like someone out of O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones.”
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