This is an interesting and different take on the series . Instead of greedy stupid people trying to make a fast easy buck then spending the episode vainly trying to turn the viewers in to grief whores this episode centres around someone who is a genuine victim . Iraqi soldier Latif Yahia finds himself pulled off the frontline in the Iran Iraq war and a counter offensive by the Persians seems like good news in comparison when he meets Uday Hussain son of Saddam who wants him to be a body double for the playboy come psychotic would be dictator . Yahia is somewhat reluctant because he's not an actor by trade but any doubts that he might not be up to the job are dispelled by spending a week in an Iraqi Ba'ath party torture chamber . Unsurprsingly Latif decides to take the job which involves pretending to be Uday Why does someone have to pretend to be an Arab dictators son ? Well he's the favoured successor of Iraq president if anything happened to President Saddam and if you've gassed Kurds , invaded Iran in an unprovoked attack , repressed Shia Muslims because the Iraqi Ba'ath party is drawn from the Secular Sunni minority and constantly purged party members because that's how dictatorship works in Iraq then you'll find there's a lot of people who might want to get rid off you
What this docu-drama does rather well is communicate the pressure Latif was under . Some thespians -dare I say all thesps - enjoy their career and the bonus of fame , fortune and awards is peripheral . Here however Latif playing Uday is literally a matter of life and death and any little mannerism that isn't perfect such as a walk , the way he holds his head , the way he swirls a gun is criticised by Uday , followed by a very violent kicking until he gets these idiosyncratic details correct . Bare in mind Latif has to make public appearances in situations and places where he faces assassination so talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place and he does survive several assassination attempts where he literally faces death
Being a guest so to speak of the Hussain clan means he has unprecedented access to this fiendish family . Not nice people at all it should be said and while Hitler was a great animal lover and Stalin liked holding parties with free vodka it's difficult to say anything nice about the Hussains ' . If Uday sees a woman who takes his fancy then she becomes his rape toy . This happened to a poor unfortunate victim - at her own wedding . And there's other incidents like this which are also go in to depth in the 2011 feature film THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE . Strangely though the episode ends with a caption suggesting this story is nowhere true as is claimed but when you've got a show that's usually centered around a convicted drugs smuggler trying to gain as much sympathy as possible blaming everyone else except themselves I found this comment to be somewhat disingenuous
What this docu-drama does rather well is communicate the pressure Latif was under . Some thespians -dare I say all thesps - enjoy their career and the bonus of fame , fortune and awards is peripheral . Here however Latif playing Uday is literally a matter of life and death and any little mannerism that isn't perfect such as a walk , the way he holds his head , the way he swirls a gun is criticised by Uday , followed by a very violent kicking until he gets these idiosyncratic details correct . Bare in mind Latif has to make public appearances in situations and places where he faces assassination so talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place and he does survive several assassination attempts where he literally faces death
Being a guest so to speak of the Hussain clan means he has unprecedented access to this fiendish family . Not nice people at all it should be said and while Hitler was a great animal lover and Stalin liked holding parties with free vodka it's difficult to say anything nice about the Hussains ' . If Uday sees a woman who takes his fancy then she becomes his rape toy . This happened to a poor unfortunate victim - at her own wedding . And there's other incidents like this which are also go in to depth in the 2011 feature film THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE . Strangely though the episode ends with a caption suggesting this story is nowhere true as is claimed but when you've got a show that's usually centered around a convicted drugs smuggler trying to gain as much sympathy as possible blaming everyone else except themselves I found this comment to be somewhat disingenuous
