The Dictator: Critic Reviews

I almost had a seizure from laughing in this film.

Baron Cohen's demonstrations of political ''outrageousness'' feel all too canned, planned, and defanged.

Potential is mostly squandered in "The Dictator," which gestures halfheartedly toward topicality and, with equal lack of conviction, toward pure, anarchic silliness.

It doesn't, in truth, offer much of a twist on the genre. It does, however, deliver laughs and weapons-grade offensiveness.

While tastelessness is rampant and the humor uneven, The Dictator also has its moments of slyly clever satire.

Never achieves the stinging parodic heights of Cohen's Borat movie, but manages a better batting average than his most recent misfire, Bruno.

Cohen and Charles offer a lot of admittedly witty observations, but they don't build into anything bigger or smarter. They're too broad.

Even in its manufactured boundary-pushing-a flash of full-frontal Baron Cohen, another scene set partially inside a birth canal-The Dictator never really risks anything.

The easily offended will be appalled. The rarely offended may be appalled. But they'll have to stop laughing long enough to realize it.

Now [Cohen is] turning material both fresh and rancid into tepid gruel.

If nothing here offends you, take a bow on behalf of your stout constitution. If nothing here makes you laugh, you might need to loosen up a tad.

Baron Cohen balances the stupid, outrageous, over-the-top stuff with almost, ahem, radically provocative observations and pronouncements...

The film has a vicious edge that the Marx Brothers didn't have, and it's too low-minded to achieve their enchanting blend of anarchy and surrealism.

The Dictator is funny, in addition to being obscene, disgusting, scatological, vulgar, crude and so on.

Cohen at his best is both brazen and sly. As is The Dictator.

Cohen is actually Chaplin's antithesis, a first-world bully content to target the Other.

Directed by Cohen's longtime collaborator Larry Charles, The Dictator mixes its high and low comedy with surprising success.

Sacha Baron Cohen's third starring feature, and the first to be fully scripted, is sharp as a scimitar in one scene and wobbly in the next, but it's unfailingly audacious.

It reasserts Baron Cohen as a comic force who can't be ignored, dedicated to pushing the envelope and working with real ideas.

For the most part, the movie's rhythms feel slightly off -- there are long stretches without a laugh -- and there is a mean-spirited air to the whole thing.

Typically, political correctness couldn't be farther from the filmmakers' mind, and yet, what the pic most sorely lacks is the sort of humanist appeal Chaplin delivered at the close of The Great Dictator.

It ends up being a lot less hilarious than "Borat,'' and not quite as funny as "Bruno.''

Cohen and Charles deserve kudos for departing from their usual formula of setting Cohen's crazed characters loose in the real world.

Transitioning back into a scripted dynamic after his quasi-documentary performance excursions with "Bruno" and "Borat," Baron Cohen loses none of his edge, combining slapstick inspiration and social commentary into a hilariously provocative blend.