Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Abegail Noëlle While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

ramonster_uk Quite a strange movie this one, not quite sure what it was trying to achieve. From the foot fetish dentist and the stalker mistress/mum, a peeping tom school teacher and the dictator who made his way to America to seek refuge with his pen pal (all while in full uniform), this movie was just a bit of hot mess. Strangely, I couldn't stop watching this, perhaps I should of though. The cast is really wasted in this movie, can't see how or why they got involved in this one, the money couldn't have been that good. But to quote Mr Caine "You get paid the same for a bad film as you do for a good one", so maybe he did alright here. You won't laugh much, if at all here. The story is pretty poor and it will leave you questioning how some movies actually get a green light.

Harm ten Napel 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.

grey-crow Michael Caine said of "Jaws: The Revenge": "I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."I have a feeling that "Dear Dictator" just paid for a conservatory.

Richard 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.