Let us now praise Dominic Cooper, who for the next year we will awfully refer to as "Dominic Fucking Cooper." His achievement in The Devil's Double is impressive by any metric: He plays both Uday Hussein (Saddam's son) and Latif Yahia, the decent young man who is drafted to impersonate Hussein to confound would-be assassins. As far as I'm-my-own-twin roles go, this is a tough one. Cooper has to play both the sociopathic presumptive future ruler of Iraq and a man who is pretending to be that deranged monster, even though he loathes everything Hussein stands for (and the whole thing is based on a true story, too, adding an additional level of peril to his performance).

Cooper does admirable work. His Hussein is a bucktoothed butcher of a celebrity, a cackling Bugs Bunny who rapes and murders and kidnaps as he pleases all over Iraq because his father is essentially God. His Yahia is a quieter, dignified man who stews in his own self-loathing as he becomes an accomplice to Hussein's many crimes against humanity. It's a terrific performance that would, in a just world, be a serious contender for an Oscar next year.

But it's a shame that the rest of Double doesn't rise to Cooper's sterling example. Ludivine Sagnier is an odd choice for a love interest, which is a polite way of saying she flat-out can't act. And while violence is a necessity in a movie about Uday Hussein, director Lee Tamahori can't seem to decide between glamorizing the violence and distancing himself from it. One shoot-out feels airlifted in from a bad episode of Miami Vice, and several scenes involving knives appear to be cheap slasher-film castoffs. Combine this with a way-too-pat third act—how do people manage to flee Iraq as fugitives, only to return without being recognized a short while later? Tamahori never deigns to show us—and you've got a movie that doesn't come anywhere near earning the magnificence that is Dominic Fucking Cooper's performance.