DAVID STRATTON: Margaret?

MARGARET POMERANZ: Well, it’s obviously a low budget production and like so much of this wonderful new genre that we are seeing emerge out of Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s grainy yet there is an incredible realism about it.

DAVID: Yes, and yet the acting was astounding. I was drawn into the story from the start. Saddam is the consummate method actor, the Al Pacino of the Arab world, who famously throws himself into his work.

MARGARET: In many ways, this is a modern reworking of that classic story about the Arab Sunni boy who comes to the big city, gets involved with Ba’athism and ends up running a country only to find himself executed by Iranian-backed Shi’a militiamen wearing balaclavas and hurling abuse.

DAVID: Indeed. Although we should point out that this wasn’t entirely a joint Iraq-Iran production but the director and scriptwriters were both Americans. That said, it’s been a long time since I’ve come out of a film feeling like I’ve just witnessed something so real and I think it’s a credit to the actors.

MARGARET: On some level, I think the film is speaking to us about revenge but, on another level, I think there is a message of redemption here. You don’t want the Saddam character to die but then you just know instinctively in your spleen that like just like the wheelchair-bound Patrick Stewart character in the X Men trilogy, Saddam can do a lot of damage even from his jail cell. He has to hang so that we can continue to have no fault divorce, wear miniskirts in summer, same-sex civil unions in Europe, marijuana in Dutch cafes, and have late-term abortions.

DAVID: That’s right. The Saddam character is a powerful metaphor for our own weakness in the face of an unremitting Islamist threat to our way of life and that is why, paradoxically, the Islamists have to kill him. And I see that Mel Gibson has had an influence here because much of the dialogue remains untranslated and in Arabic.

MARGARET: I’m giving it four stars. David?

DAVID: I’m giving it four and a half.