I think it's very clear that Forest Whitaker will get an Oscar nomination (if not a win) for his amazing performance as Idi Amin. The Last King of Scotland shows us this brutal dictator through the eyes of his Scotish doctor. It seems Amin really did have a Scotish doctor, but this character (Nicholas Garrigan, played by James McAvoy) is fictionalized.
The movie starts with the graduation of Garrigan. He's a doctor but not ready to join his dad in practice. After a literal spin of the globe he goes to Uganda and works in a small clinic. He's naive and a bit reckless. After a chance meeting, we find out that Amin loves the Scots and hires Garrigan as his personal physician.
The film is structured around two simultaneous arcs. Amin goes from charasmatic leader shown through the eyes of Garrigan to the brutal dictator we know. Garrigan goes from naive twenty-something not ready to begin his own life, to someone who's made some stupid choices with tragic consequences and trying to save himself (or maybe not caring).
There are some parallels to and commentaries on British colonialism thrown in too but the strength of the movie is Whitaker's performance. Amin is simultaneously magnetic, unpredicatable and terrifying. The weakness is that you don't really care about Garrigan, nevertheless that didn't bother me at all. The film also gives a strong sense of the seventies without ever parodying it.
We're mostly spared scenes of Amin's evil as Garrigan merely hears them from a British representative. However, I found the two brief shots of sadistic mutilation to be much more disturbing than say the execution-style shootings of The Departed. It's probably because this is based on a real life monster as opposed a fictional story that seemed a bit gratuitous.
If you can handle it, go see this film. It has one of the best performances you'll ever see.
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