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Sacha Baron Cohen’s ‘The Dictator:’ It doesn’t look like ‘Borat’

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‘The Dictator’ involves several of the main players from ‘Borat’ (star-writer Sacha Baron Cohen, director Larry Charles) and also tells of the foibles of the foreign-born. But fans are hoping — and studio Paramount seems keen to impress — that the May movie, which has Baron Cohen playing both a deposed foreign dictator and a goat herder, is a lot more than a ‘Borat’ retread.

Several new images suggest that, visually at least, ‘The Dictator’ has put some distance between itself and the 2006 hit. Earlier this week came a paparazzi photo of Baron Cohen, clad in a patriotic jumpsuit, on a New York set, which at least made clear that the film has a set, with little of the on-the-road gonzo tactics of ‘Borat.’

Now Paramount has put out the first official image for the film — that’s it to the left — and it shows a character who has much more in common with a Middle Eastern despot than the deluded Eastern European peasant from ‘Borat.’ Note the Kadafi-like epaulets, which raises the question of how much the film will echo the real-world dictators thrown to the fore of the news cycle in the recent Arab Spring.

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(The film is putatively based on a novel written by Saddam Hussein, who makes a somewhat less sensitive target.)

No doubt the finished film will include accents and cringe-worthy moments and other elements that characterized ‘Borat.’ But ‘The Dictator’ may not want to distance itself too much — ‘Borat’ was kinda beloved.

RELATED:
A ‘Borat reunion on Sacha Baron Cohen’s ‘The Dictator’

— Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

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