'The Devil's Double' Trailer

I always have high hopes for Lee Tamahori — coming out of the gate with a film as powerful as Once Were Warriors earns a lot of patience — but I'm almost always disappointed. Is that going to be the case with his latest film, The Devil's Double, a lurid-looking potboiler based on a true story in which Dominic Cooper plays both Uday Hussein and the man coerced into being his safety double? Check out the trailer below and make your own prediction.

Despite the fact that this is a crazy, meaty dual role for Dominic Cooper, I'm betting on disappointment once more. The movie looks to me like shiny, silly garbage. Not that it won't be entertaining — given that the film is rated R for "strong brutal bloody violence and torture, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and pervasive language" it could well be a lot of fun to watch, at least in spurts. But good? That seems out of reach. What do you think? Does this have a chance to rise above the 'Scarface in the Middle East' sort of premise? And would it be better off if an Arab actor was playing the dual lead roles?

Summoned from the frontline to Saddam Hussein's palace, Iraqi army lieutenant Latif Yahia is thrust into the highest echelons of the "royal family" when he's ordered to become the 'fiday' — or body double — to Saddam's son, the notorious "Black Prince" Uday Hussein, a reckless, sadistic party-boy with a rabid hunger for sex and brutality. With his and his family's lives at stake, Latif must surrender his former self forever as he learns to walk, talk and act like Uday. But nothing could have prepared him for the horror of the Black Prince's psychotic, drug-addled life of fast cars, easy women and impulsive violence. With one wrong move costing him his life, Latif forges an intimate bond with Sarrab, Uday's seductive mistress who's haunted by her own secrets. But as war looms with Kuwait and Uday's depraved gangster regime threatens to destroy them all, Latif realizes that escape from the devil's den will only come at the highest possible cost.

Want to see twice the Dominic Cooper in HD? Yahoo has it.