This crass comedy really calls for a regime change

Dir: Larry Charles

With: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anna Faris, John C Reilly

Running time: 83 minutes

IF this piece was in keeping with the movie it reviews, it would punch you in the face by way of a greeting, spit in the eye of those pinko liberal sensibilities you call principles and threaten to waterboard your dog if you don't laugh at the jokes.

Welcome to The Dictator, Sacha Baron Cohen's latest comic outrage after Bruno and Borat, and a film that's heavier on the outrage than the comic.

If you are not offended by Baron Cohen at many points in this movie you should ask for a refund. Affronting the audience, more than making them laugh, seems to be the guiding principle here.

The Dictator marks a departure for Baron Cohen in that it is a wholly fictional film. Previously, he has posed as an ignorant documentary maker from Kazakhstan (Borat) and an airhead fashionista (Bruno), and the comedy lay in his "punking" real people, rubbing their faces in his characters' outrageous views to provoke a response.

He duly got a reaction, lots of money and the chance to play with a bigger train set in The Dictator.

Baron Cohen plays General Aladeen, a soup of every nutso tyrant from recent years. Aladeen is a little bit Gaddafi, with a dash of Kim Jong-il and several bucketloads of Uday Hussein. He's sexist, racist, murderous and trying to develop a nuclear capability, or as he puts it, a "beard of doom" weapon.

As he prepares to wreak havoc, others in the regime want him gone. So it is, after lots of handbrake turns in the plot, that the general comes to be living as an ordinary bod in New York City. There, he is taken under the wing of the achingly liberal Zoe.

Played by Anna Faris, Zoe is a character so burdened with clichés – she owns a health food shop, she's painfully politically correct, has short hair, etc – she should have been given a porter to accompany her wherever she went.

Right-wing dictator meets trendy lefty, cue the jokes. Some raise a smile, others might make you shriek with embarrassment, all are screamingly obvious. Like the rest of the comedy in The Dictator, it's basically Viz with Highers.

If it came from a bunch of adolescents at the school play, you might think how clever, how daring, how advanced for their age. A look at the credits, though, reveals a line-up of grown-ups previously responsible for some of the best comedy of recent times. Larry Charles, the director, besides Borat and Bruno, has written, directed and produced Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage.

Baron Cohen's three fellow screenplay writers are all Curb/Seinfeld graduates too. For people who worked on such subtle, delicately tuned comedies, they don't half indulge their baser instincts here.

Perhaps it's a form of therapy. The pressure of being clever-clever for so long might have made them yearn to wallow in wall-to-wall asininity. Maybe being so right-on all the time inevitably produces a reaction.

Humour is a notoriously subjective thing. One person's Borat is another person's bore. Fair enough. It's grand to be daring, different, outrageous. Where would comedy be without its taboo busters? Sometimes, though, one does wonder if Baron Cohen will ever be up there with the Chaplins and the Bruces, the Iannuccis and the Chris Morrises.

There's one scene, for example, in which Baron Cohen's character is introduced to his virginal guards and told to have his way with them. The camera proceeds to treat us not just to a full frontal gaze at the women being disrobed but, fnar, fnar, a shot of them from the back as well. Is this cutting edge comedy or Benny Hill revived?

As for the satirical daring on display, good luck finding it. When Charlie Chaplin lampooned another facial hair wearer in The Great Dictator it was 1940 and the world had gone up in flames. Faced with the Arab spring, Baron Cohen reaches for the poo jokes.

It is too easy to have a sense of humour failure about Baron Cohen. He revels in taunting liberals, the better to test their principles (at least I think this is the theory). Yet he can be genuinely funny and inspired at times.

The Keaton-by-way-of-Woody-Allen scene with the baby goat and the bananas even had me laughing. Particularly at the end, when he drops the crudity in favour of cleverness, when he raises the comedy bar instead of bludgeoning the audience with it, you can see why so many praise him.

It would be no trouble to play along, to cut him the kind of slack he would never dream of cutting others, to indulge his self-indulgence. In this part of the cinema universe, however, we hold to the quaint notion that if you pays your money for a comedy it should do more than make you smile occasionally. If that's being dictatorial, tough.