A Dangerous Game, film review: Impassioned documentary targets abuse of power by golf-loving kleptocrats

(PG) Anthony Baxter, 101 mins

Geoffrey Macnab
Thursday 11 September 2014 23:59 BST
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Buffoonish: Donald Trump in A Dangerous Game
Buffoonish: Donald Trump in A Dangerous Game

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Anthony Baxter's follow-up to his 2011 documentary You've Been Trumped is an impassioned and often very funny affair. Its target is, again, "arrogant, ill-informed billionaires" who build golf courses in beauty spots, regardless of the environmental havoc they wreak.

Baxter travels from the dunes of Aberdeenshire, site of one of the US tycoon Donald Trump's luxury resorts, to Croatia, China and the deserts of Nevada. Trump appears on camera, blustering away in typically buffoonish fashion.

Also interviewed is his nemesis, Michael Forbes, the farmer who refused to sell up to him and was later voted Glenfiddich's "Top Scot" as a result.

The SNP leader Alex Salmond comes out of the film very badly (utterly craven in the face of Trump's money and fame), while the actor Alec Baldwin is an unlikely local hero in the Hamptons, an articulate and well-informed eco-warrior.

Baxter's film-making style is similar to that of Louis Theroux and Jon Ronson. He's playful and mischievous but never loses sight of the bigger points he is trying to make about the abuse of power and democracy by golf-loving kleptocrats.

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