Although not a movie at the top of my must see viewing list The Last King of Scotland was certainly a lot better and much more hard hitting than I expected it would be. You get the gist of the movie from the shorts -a Scottish lad Nick, played by James McAvoy, goes to Uganda and is taken under the wing of president Idi Amin, brilliantly acted by Forest Whitaker. An idealist Nick is swept up in the life of luxury but doesn’t grasp the horrors of Amin’s reign until a dangerous liaison with Amin’s third wife results in her being chopped up until many tiny pieces. The trailers don’t prepare you for these truly ewe-some scenes including seeing Nick hung up by giant hooks pierced through the skin on his chest. The movie hides none of the atrocities of Amin’s leadership.

The story is awful and tragic and loses nothing in the interpretation on to the big screen. It is at once mesmirising and stomach turning. Its sad to think that such a charming man could cause such pain to his own country and country men. He could have done so much and instead it appears he went a little cuckoo and paranoid about being in leadership and as a result killed apparently over 300,000 of his country men. Very sad.