The Devil's Double and more movies on the megalomaniacal

The funniest thing I ever read about Uday and Qusay Hussein was that the guy who betrayed their final hideout was also the host who'd catered to their every iron whim – and that he finally grassed them up because they were obnoxious, demanding, entitled little brats. To the last, it would seem, judging by The Devil's Double , which offers us a factually supercharged account of the toxic and violent relationship between Uday, Saddam's psychotic elder son, and his press-ganged doppelganger Latif Yahia. They're both played by Dominic Cooper in a batty, star-making double performance that is far more fun than the movie haphazardly slung around it. Uday's a handful, living out some Baathist-inflected fantasia on De Palma's Scarface , shooting off guns indoors, plucking schoolgirls off the streets and raping them, exercising Caligulan droit du seigneur over a war hero's new bride, prompting her suicide, and mutilating and disembowelling his own dad's food-taster at a banquet to honour Mrs Hosni Mubarak (par-TAY!). Scotch, vodka, cigars, cocaine, heroin, porn, torture, rape and murder are his toys and his games, so he's the most nightmarish playmate you can imagine. And with all these mirrors and doppelgangers, it's like a psychopathic remake of The Parent Trap. Now that the worst of the worst have finally made it to the screen, we're in a mini golden age of superviolent thrillers about megalomaniacal despots and their sleazy retinues, mass killers and deranged terrorists. Film-makers have worked their way through all the 70s middle-class revolutionary nutters: Baader-Meinhof , Carlos the Jackal (movie of the year, btw), and the hari kiri-happy Japanese Red Army. For a while now in England we've been dining on the iniquities of murderers once thought undepictable on screen – Brady and Hindley, the Yorkshire Ripper and, up next, Fred West . It was inevitable that we'd get round to the full-bore tyrants and visionary super-criminals. Like Pablo Escobar, whose blood-gorged biography makes Scarface look like Funny Face. Scarface screenwriter Oliver Stone binned his planned Escobar biopic in the face of competing projects; another, if it ends up being directed by Antoine Fuqua, will be worse than that idiotic Escobar movie made in Entourage. As for dictators, forget about the Hussein small-fry, and head for the meaty monsters: Hitler was well taken care of in Downfall , so let's see Stalin drinking his subordinates under the table as he merrily murders his people by the million. Or Mao, with his pus-filled gums, unquenchable lusts and murderous policies. Since budgetary constraints make these unlikely, I instead urge noted film-maker, supreme tyrant and lifelong entitled brat Kim Jong-il to take up his film crew, coerce the population of North Korea into extra-duty, and film his glorious autobiography posthaste.