Dear Dictator
Dear Dictator is awful. It is adequately shot, and so must be rated a notch above the truly terrible flicks like Birdemic and Battleship Earth, which admittedly is condemnation by faint praise, however its abysmal script and questionable sensibilities take its fairly pedestrian production to new lows.
The movie has an intriguing premise: what if a rebellious, punk rock girl became pen pals with a third world despot and then, when a revolution ousts him from power, he makes his way to America to hide out in her garage. Obviously a ridiculous conceit, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Suspension of disbelief, especially for a comedy or satire, can go a long way. The Big Lebowski is about a listless stoner who, thanks to his unfortunate name, finds himself battling nihilists and trying to avenge his soiled rug and yet the Coen Brothers turn that into something surprisingly smart and watchable. Dear Dictator’s script isn’t a work of bizarre genius, however, it is just bad.
The movie aims to be a sort of spiritual successor to Mean Girls, but this time the metaphor for high school hierarchies is a communist revolutionary’s understanding of class struggle rather than the preening and fighting for status of the wilds of Africa. Mean Girls is a modern day classic full of endlessly quotable lines and relatable moments. Dear Dictator, on the other hand, has no real sense of how high school cliques operate. Behavior that, in the script, is intended to win people over would repulse them in real life. There is a whole sequence with a bloody tampon that would never go the way that it goes in the movie.
In fact, the movie in general relies on all kinds of bizarre things other than the strength of its basic premise for its comedy. The mom dates a dentist with a weird foot fetish and his desire to suck toes is played for a laugh. The girl’s hyper Christian friend and semi-love interest waffles between being a pointless character and a target for mockery based on the ferverency of his beliefs or how he tragically fails to live up to them. These all feel extraneous to the plot, a distraction from one of the movie’s sole strengths, and, worst of all, none of it is funny.
The one thing that does really work is the endlessly talented Michael Caine as the deposed despot. It is actually very funny to hear him wax poetic about how Machiavelli’s The Prince can be used to upset the existent social order in a high school or opine about how the oppressed masses (i.e. bullied kids) are like the proletariat searching for a revolutionary to topple the current regime. There is a little brief glimpse of clever writing here, too, as the idealized version of punk rebellion and revolution touted by the protagonist teen comes face to face with the realities of revolution’s frequently violent upheaval and destructive effects. It just isn’t enough, the acting or the writing, to carry an otherwise cringe inducing coming of age comedy that feels entirely out of touch with the youth it portrays.
Dear Dictator tries to walk a line between being about clever observations on the high school experience through an unexpected lens like Mean Girls and being about the crass and shocking like American Pie. In theory this can be done, I suppose, but here it feels like it is merely splitting focus. If it tried to lean into the strength of its premise and allowed itself to be a little smarter maybe it could have been something. Instead, it is awkward, unfunny, and lacking in verisimilitude. Yes, the premise stretches the realm of belief, but once you accept that premise everything within that should make sense and in Dear Dictator it doesn’t.
Would Recommend: If you just love watching Michael Caine in anything, no matter how awful.
Would Not Recommend: If you value your time on Earth.