Sacha Baron Cohen rides into New York as General Aladeen aka The Dictator. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount Pictures
After his live-ammo situationist spoofs Borat and Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen has returned to the world of the straight fiction-feature with his broad comedy satire The Dictator. There is one thing to be said straight away. This is not, repeat not, a cinephile homage to Chaplin's The Great Dictator.
It is less edgy than Baron Cohen's previous two films, featuring big, conventionally contrived gags and a colossal central turn from the man himself. Baron Cohen's Dictator is set to make Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau a model of subtlety and sensitivity.
The movie is in the fish-out-of-water tradition of Coming to America and many others. It doesn't, in truth, offer much of a twist on the genre. It does, however, deliver laughs and weapons-grade offensiveness.
Baron Cohen plays General Aladeen, the tyrannical ruler of the oil-rich north African rogue state Wadiya, who is intensely irritated by the western powers' infatuation with the Arab spring. This political annoyance is compounded by the stress of having to keep Osama Bin Laden in one of the spare rooms in his obscenely opulent palace after the Americans took out one of the al-Qaida leader's doubles.
He exerts a grotesque, Orwellian power and abolishes hundreds of words in the Adiyan dictionary, insidiously eroding his people's moral sense by replacing "positive" and "negative" with "Aladeen", leading to tense moments in the Wadiyan HIV clinics.
His confrontation with Washington has reached a crisis after a speech in which he announced Wadiya was just months away from enriching uranium, and then corpsed and giggled uncontrollably when trying to claim that this was for "clean energy purposes".
In fact, Aladeen is obsessed with nuclear capability and succumbs to Freudian rage at the thought of not having a big missile. "Everyone has one," he screams, "even Ahmadinejad and he looks like a snitch from Miami Vice!" There is a horribly funny scene in which Aladeen confronts his nuclear scientist about slow progress and reveals his assumptions about rockets and warhead delivery systems are based entirely upon cartoons.
But an invasion threat from the US forces Aladeen's hand. He is compelled to visit New York to explain himself to the UN and, like Borat before him, finds himself stunned in various ways by the strange and exotic world of New York City hotels: "Twenty dollars a day for wi-fi? And they call me an international criminal!"
But the general's duplicitous brother, played by Ben Kingsley, turns out to have a treasonous plan in mind and Aladeen finds himself anonymous and penniless on the Manhattan streets and becomes dependent on the charity of a feminist vegetarian cafe manager, played by Anna Faris, who comes to his rescue like Jamie Lee Curtis with Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places.
Subtle it isn't. The satirical content is far lower than in Borat, apart from one Michael Moore-ish speech at the end, in which Aladeen begs America to become a dictatorship and, in laying out the advantages, inadvertently reveals that this would involve no changes at all.
But basically this is a firework display of bad taste, calculated to be as silly as possible. I laughed a lot when Faris's character uncovers Aladeen's vulnerable side and the awful truth that his political aggression stems from the fact that he has never masturbated. Learning how to do this in the cafe's unisex toilet – with montages of soaring eagles and leaping dolphins – is a spiritual epiphany.
There is some great material in the time-honoured movie tradition of people in a tight spot making up false names from signs that they just happen to see.
It is gasp-inducingly offensive when the general plays his terrorist Wii in the palace and selects a game called "Munich Olympics". We hear screams of "meshuggeneh". Inevitably, Aladeen later explains, sentimentally, how living in New York has taught him to love Yiddish because the words sound like what they mean.
It is relentlessly immature and I was often reminded of the cheerfully reprehensible Kentucky Fried Movie in the 70s, a film unashamedly low in nutritional value. But it was very funny and so is this. The Dictator isn't going to win awards and it isn't as hip as Borat. Big goofy outrageous laughs is what it has to offer.
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