Dear Dictator (2018)

It has been 18 years since Quills, the last robust accomplishment by Michael Caine. There is no excuse for this movie. Here goes.Tatiania Mills (Odeya Rush) will dislodge and eat ABC (Already Been Chewed) gum from beneath the water fountain to taunt and gross out her adversaries at school. Sir Michael Caine again does the equivalent to his career by starring in this mindless atrocity. Michael Caine plays a deposed British Caribbean Republic dictator who comes the the U.S. and teams with a high school goth loser. He does this to teach her the ways of revolution so she can overthrow the mean bully girls in her High School.This movie was supposedly released on March 16, 2018, but I cannot find any statistics where it was shown in any brick and mortar theaters in The United States. Even Box Office Mojo shows no trace of either Dear Dictator or its original title of Coup d'Etat. It is as though it doesn't exist except at rouge movie sites or the inevitable Amazon Prime Video for $6.99, which is $7.00 too much. Other than the sycophant Alfred in the Batman movies, Caine has not done anything meaningful since the masterpiece Quills, and that was almost 2 decades ago. I'm glad that Ebert is not alive to see Caine actually tunnel to a new low after the disaster that was Jaws IV.Oh my Goat, this movie was horrible on every level. Dictator and Tatiana become pen-pals and the next thing you know, he shows up not on her doorstep, but in her garage. No Problem! Mom is clued in and consents for The Dictator to stay if only he will fix the broken garage door opener. He does, and then in a deeply moving scene, he instructs Tatiana how to overthrow the factions in her High School. Brilliant! Enter the Revolution!The shock and awe at the Mall was cringe-worthy and the side story of Tatiana's mother and her foot-freaky dentist employer were new lows for cinema... but not as low as the scene where El Dictator sternly lectures Darlene MIlls (Katie Holmes) and daughter about the evils of American society. He then turns into some sort of 85 year-old Gordon Ramsey master chef. I want to die. Not later, but right now. Never in the history of film has anything been as bad as this debacle.The rest of this movie was irrelevant. It was horrible. ZERO/10.0

Tragic to see Sir Michael Caine appear in such a lousy movie. Is this poorly scripted effort supposed to be a comedy, a satire, a society commentary, A John Waters tribute? I don't know. As a comedy it is about as funny as smallpox, as a satire it simply does not work, as a social commentary it is offensive! What I have I just tried to watch? I don't really know! What I do know is, this movie stinks! I could not bear to see the ending after I'd wasted 80+ minutes of my life trying to watch this utterly awful concoction. I've given it 1 star, though it really deserves no stars, but I give it one star for two reasons. 1. The fact that Sir Michael Caine is in it, and 2, the fact that one of the cuts in this film, depicts a row of plastic pink flamingos - clearly a nod to the "Great" John Waters, though a John Waters satire it aint! Avoid this film, dont buy it, don't pay to see it, don't attempt to download it, it is hateful!

This mildly funny movie about an ousted dictator holing up with the daughter of a single mother in a typical suburban environment with the cliché high-school mean girls can only be regarded positively in the sense that it is great learning lesson for upcoming talent Odeya Rush who gets to build experience acting together with an icon such as Michael Caine and to a lesser extent Katie Holmes for which for this performance nobody would start jumping on a couch. Seth Green, apparently added to the cast for his name only (that has been slightly degraded in the process) plays a dentist with a feet fetishism which is an appropriately chosen weirdness that can be safely depicted for the ever perceived sensitivity of the American audience. The dictator, while trying to regain the control of his country starts to educate the high-school-er in subversiveness which she starts to put into practice by overthrowing the realm of the mean girls without much moral concern. There's no explanation given to the fact she has a crush on a religious freak who dives into bed with one of the same mean girls and both are in fact headed for a happy end (save for a neck brace after a failed suicide attempt) when the inevitable happens as the dictator is being apprehended, jailed and extradited. The acting overall isn't bad but the story is weak, these actors deserve a better script.

Boy, the other reviews here are scathing, but as far as I'm concerned, this film ain't so bad.From the opening credits I could see that this movie was extremely low budget and so I set my expectations equally low. In the end I was surprised on two counts: firstly, the film wasn't that bad; and secondly, that 4 of the other 5 reviewers here on IMDB rated it so badly.The story is ridiculous. A dictator gets overthrown and flees to the US where he knows he can hide with a young girl who has chosen him to be her pen-pal and who he believes will protect him. Choosing Michael Caine for the role is equally ridiculous, as is the rest of the film's story line. But that's what I think the other reviewers here have missed: the whole story is so ridiculous that you cannot take any of it seriously, and it therefore becomes an amusing romp through a series of intentionally absurd scenarios.This in itself is not enough however, and the actors need to treat the film with just the right amount of enthusiasm to make it work. Caine's acting? He's long been one of my favourites, but in this he doesn't even bother to hide his cockney accent...but who cares! Brilliant acting is not what this film is about, so having Caine in the role becomes an amusement in itself (Caine not even remotely attempting to hide his cockney accent should have tipped off the other reviewers over the intentions of this film). I've never liked Katie Holmes, but in this I thought she was excellent. She had me totally believing in her selfish stupidity, and she appears to have treated this film to a fair degree of effort in bringing her desperate-for-a-man character to life. Odesya also handles herself well, as does Seth Green, and together the four of them manage to make this an entertaining low budget production.What gets me though is that the other reviewers here seem to have been expecting something greater. Why? The poorly done backdrop of a crowd during Caine's speech made it clear that this film was meant to be a joke, as did his responses to her letters, and I found myself chuckling over the intentional ridiculousness of it all a number of times during the film.The story is easy to follow, the editing is well handled, the casting was fine, the acting ranged from adequate to really good, so anybody who thinks this film is worth only 1/10 must have only just started watching movies yesterday, having started with Ben Hur. I have seen a hundred films way worse than this, and so I think these low ratings are missing the mark. Trust me, if you recognise the movie for what it's meant to be you should find it fun, and I personally give it a 6/10.