The Lost King and the Scotsman, A Movie Review

Every once in awhile a movie comes along that is so compelling, so rich in character and plot, so diverse in nature and revealing in sentiment that it becomes nearly pointless to dance about architecture under the moonlit sky in a thong. The Lost King and a Scotsman may or may not be one such movie.

Starring Forrest Whitlicker (Hello, Vietnam!, Look Who's Crying, Pandic Rune), Jim MacElroy (Narnya: The Lion King's Wardrobe), Agent Scully (X-Men Files: Fight the Future Shock), and directed by Kevin McDonalds (That One Day In September: Not That One—Tuesday Week), The Lost King and a Scotsman poses the question historians have been wrestling with for 5 generations and counting, namely: What happens when a zany black African despot of the negro persuasion meets up with a nutty bog-trotting doctor of the Celtic variety?

Answer: Let the hilarious and madcap adventures ensue!

It's got all the elements of a "buddies on the road" picture: racial tension, laugh-out-loud pratfalls, social disenfranchisement, unrequited love, torture and genocide.

It's got all the elements of a "political thriller": racial tension, laugh-out-loud pratfalls, social disenfranchisement, unrequited love, torture and genocide.

It's got all the elements of a "sci-fi space opera": racial tension, laugh-out-loud pratfalls, social disenfranchisement, unrequited love, torture and genocide.

It's got all the elements of a "romantic comedy": racial tension, laugh-out-loud pratfalls, social disenfranchisement, unrequited love, torture and genocide.

It's got all the elements of a "socio-historical period piece drama": racial tension, laugh-out-loud pratfalls, social disenfranchisement, unrequited love, torture and genocide.

It's got all the elements of a "hard-core Asian-on-Asian docupornomentary": racial tension, laugh-out-loud pratfalls, social disenfranchisement, unrequited love, torture and genocide.

It's even got all the elements of Guantanamo Bay. Whoa!

MacElroy plays Nick Garrison, a family physician and sometime traveler who stumbles across the fictional nation of Rhugandwa, a country that's been struggling with its own sense of self, its innate ability to piss off its neighbors, and its unique penchant for destroying itself by killing each other for reasons of racial purity that seem to be lost on everyone except them.

But hold onto your "talking stick" and your headdress made out of a dead animal, because faster than you can say, "I've got it: Let's have another civil war for apparently no reason that's not clear to anyone," The Gods Must Be Crazy meets Schindler's List, and we're swept away to the land of milk and homey when Nick crosses paths with Edie Ameen (Whitlicker), dictator, confidant, citizen-killing Stalin wannabe, and a "royal" pain in the arse. Aye, laddy! Fuh Focksake, dah, I din't do'it.

But I'd go ahead and leave the birth control devices at home, folks, because this is Africa. And the only thing more insidious than arming its citizens with an affordable way to prevent unwanted pregnancies is arming its citizens with an affordable way to prevent unwanted AIDS. Very disarming, to say the least. Get us out of the U.N.!

But it's not all fun and games. Because before you have time to consult the Tribal Elders, the movie strikes a somber yet serious posture when Edie's wife, Thanohtswaht Ameen (Terry Washburn [Little Women, The Waiter]), accidentally gets half of her fellow countrymen killed in a bizarre yet intriguing interior decorating mishap. Thanotswaht tells Garrison that she wants her "500,000 square foot royal palace to be decorated in keeping with the hearts, minds, souls and bodies of her fellow Rhugandwainians so that we remember that as blood flows through our veins, we're all equal to that which we aspire, and the palace must represent the nobility in all of us."

But after Garrison translates that from Rhugandwese into Gaelic and then back into Rhugandwese for Edie, it comes out more like she wants "500,000 bodies of her fellow Rhugandwainians to expire so that blood flows through every corridor [Nick got a little creative with the Gaelic word for "veins", methinks!] of the royals' place so that we dismember [For goodness sakes, watch your Rhugandwese cases there, Nickster!] their bodies so that human hearts will decorate our nobility."

Ouch!

So, one thing leads to another, and Nick's fast and loose handling of declensions and conjugations leads to a makeover bloodbath even Tommy Fellatio of Queer Guys with the Narrow Eye would be horrified by. "You can't put a decapitated corpse in the bay window! It obstructs the view of the pile of arms and legs organic sculpture in the courtyard and totally clashes with the window treatments!" You tell him, Tom!

And that's when Edie completely freaks out and "loses it", thus his "lost" status.

But I wouldn't want to give a way too many secrets. (THE KING AND THE LAND ARE ONE!!!)

Folks, when push comes to shove and shove comes to punch and punch comes to another punch and another punch comes to something eerily reminiscent of that one episode of Star Trek when Captain Kirk has to fight that lizard-looking space dude on a planet that contains everything he needs to make a rock-shooting potato gun including but not limited to a hollowed-out tube, sulfur, flint, and an actual rock-shooting potato gun (and the son of a bitch does it!), and rock-shooting potato guns come to machine guns and machine guns come to machetes, we don't want movies like The Lost King and a Scotsman. We need movies like The Lost King and a Scotsman, if for no other reason than when we finally call a spade a spade, i.e., "genocide", that's only the first step in a long line of steps doing nothing to solve the problem or relieve the misery of hundreds of thousands of innocent bystanders who get slaughtered by people who think the United Nations is an actual country, and a joke, which, in a lot of cases, it really is. Both.