The young doctor thinks he's in Africa for all the right reasons, but we can tell early on that he's not. So can his powerful benefactor, an insecure, homicidal dictator who goes by the name of Idi Amin.

The doctor isn't real; "The Last King of Scotland" is one of those fictional stories based on an infamous historical figure (like "Max," the 2002 portrait of Hitler as a young artist). But it's also a shrewd commentary on misguided Western excursions into the "dark continent."

And come awards season, it will be the movie that makes Forest Whitaker a solid bet to take home his first Oscar.

Whitaker plays the infamous Ugandan ruler as a moody, wound-up child with a talent for making those around him feel special — until he decides it's time for them to die. He bounds about his palace like a 280-pound ballerina, proclaiming his oneness with an impoverished populace and throwing swanky affairs for moneyed dignitaries.

He talks a charming game, and it doesn't take much to win over the fictional Dr. Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), a callow Scotsman on the make in a strange new land. The rakish doctor fixes the dictator's hand after a car accident, accepts an offer to be Amin's personal physician and soon finds himself driving a shiny new Mercedes convertible. Only later does he find himself waist deep in blood-soaked African geopolitics.

In short, the not-so-good doctor doesn't know what he's getting into until he finds out the hard way. He sees Uganda as his playground for adventure, prestige and sex — his conquests include one of his boss's wives (Kerry Washington) — and not as a real place rife with deadly postcolonial conflict. If "Hotel Rwanda" was a tragedy of Western apathy, then "The Last King of Scotland" is a condemnation of Western arrogance.

Director Kevin Macdonald, who made the outstanding rock climbing survival docudrama "Touching the Void," indulges in the occasional stylistic excess as Garrigan sees the walls collapsing on his deluded security. Drinking heavily at an Amin soiree, his vision starts to blur and his point of view takes on the pseudo-psychedelic feel of an Oliver Stone mistake.

But the evenly paced "Last King" plays it smart by concealing details of the Amin regime's reign of terror until you might think the big guy is just a little nutty. We know different, of course; Amin was responsible for the murder of anywhere from 300,000 to 500,000 people.

Yet Garrigan, like so much of the world during Amin's rule, falls for the buffoon act and even helps bring down an Amin foil.

By the time he finally sees the bloodshed up close, he's no longer just a well-placed tourist. He's a very reluctant resident, and he shares in his new country's bloody fate.