Where did it all go wrong for Lee Tamahori? With his 1994 Once were Warriors, the Kiwi received worldwide acclaim for his brutal portrayal of contemporary Maori culture, but since then has struggled to reach the same heights with contrived genre-flicks (xXx , its sequel XXX: State of the Union, the Nicholas Cage vehicle Next) and effectively brought about the death of Bond as we new him with the dire Die Another Day. Tamahori’s private life also hit headlines, when it was revealed that in 2006, whilst dressed in drag, he was caught by an uncover LAPD officer allegedly soliciting oral sex, resurfacing old rumours about his somewhat saucy double life.
This is perhaps what attracted him to The Devil’s Double, the story of Latif Yahia, a man forced to become the body double of Saddam Hussein’s psychotic son Uday, with British actor Dominic Cooper in the lead as both men.
While serving at the front in the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980s, Latif is pulled away from combat by the secret service and brought back to Baghdad. There he is reintroduced to Uday Hussein, with whom he had gone to school and always shared a similar appearance, so much so, that Uday claims him as his new brother and has Latif surgically altered to make the resemblance uncanny. Now forced into sharing in the decadence of Uday’s life, with cars, drugs, clothes and women thrust upon him, Latif struggles to cope with the heavy weight of losing his identity and living at the beck and call of an increasingly unstable and violent man.
