It was 8 P.M. Saturday night and we were out on our second date in as many weeks. In a Lansing bar-and-grill called “Rose,” I gingerly lifted lukewarm bits of onion from the salad bar, and for a rare moment I was deep in thought. Deep in one thought, actually, and there beneath the odd, gloomy, stained plastic pseudo-skylights of the bar-and-grill, I locked eyes with my reflection in a crystal clean sneeze guard and muttered, “You’re not very good at choosing date movies.”

When Miami’s and, indeed, much of the nation’s police force, is put completely out of commission by an act of bio-terrorism, it will fall unto the Reno Sheriff’s department to save the day. Led by Lieutenant Jim Dangle, the motley collection of ne’er-do-well cops will do battle with gangsters, common thugs, alligators, drunks, drugs, the water, a whale, an assistant to the mayor, homeland security, a chicken and very nearly, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as they wildly search for a mysterious antidote.

The tale of Idi Amin’s revolution in Uganda is a historically contorted one, and it is also eerily familiar. Amin was once described by the British Foreign services as “a splendid type and a good football player,” and he was at first hailed locally and abroad as a savior of distressed Uganda. The world’s hope was betrayed when within months of seizing the Ugandan throne in 1971, Amin set himself up as “president for life” (eventually he would change his title to “His Excellency Al-Hadji Field Marshal Dr. Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Life President of the Republic of Uganda”) and established a regime of suspicion, interrogation and torture under an agency termed the “State Research Organization.” Under Amin, Asians and individuals practicing minority religions as well as intellectuals in general were banished from Uganda under the penalty of death. Predictably, the economy imploded immediately, and the nation itself followed thereafter.