On the screen is Bob Hoskins as Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega, in full seething, blistering tirade about the moral weakness of the U.S. and the "gringo's" ravenous appetite for drugs. He's thoroughly disgusted by such behavior.

On the receiving end of his rant are two young Americans hoping to open illegal drug operations in his homeland.

A valise is passed to Noriega, who opens it and stonily eyes the bundles of cash, then pauses briefly. "Panama welcomes you," he tells his new business partners.

The subject of Showtime's "Noriega: God's Favorite" is at once wicked and wickedly funny.

Entertainment is the clear intent of director Roger Spottiswoode and scenarist Lawrence Wright, from the moment Noriega's personal pilot tells him he looks like a "Colombian pimp" in his yellow jumpsuit and white shoes. Minutes later, the self-described "poor, ugly alley cat" is in Switzerland getting a skin graft on his famed pineapple face.

So watch at your own risk. Although the script seems to exaggerate only marginally the deposed despot's bizarre personal conduct--including his storied bisexual escapades and reliance on voodoo--Wright acknowledges that some of "Noriega" is imagined. A broadly executed, highly rewarding biographical sketch it is, a definitive biography it isn't.

Once beyond the jolt of seeing Noriega as a darkly comic figure, watching this seductive movie becomes easy. Although not painless, given the savagery by which this "unrepentant criminal," as President George Bush titled him, kept his stubby thumb on Panama's windpipe. That ended when he was ousted in 1989 after a U.S. invasion that delivered him to south Florida for a trial whose jury convicted him of racketeering, conspiracy and cocaine smuggling. Twice turned down for parole, he is scheduled to be released from prison in 2007 at age 71.

Wright has Noriega turning Panama into a revolving door through which shipments of illegal arms and drugs pass, with a fortune in profits going to him and his cronies. Meantime, he angers just about everyone, from his mistress, Vicky Amador (Rosa Blasi), to his shrew of a wife, Felicidad (Denise Blasor). More significantly, the anti-Noriega crowd comes to include the U.S., which kept him on the payroll as an informer for years, and the drug lords whose businesses he undermined after accepting their millions in protection money.

Shot in the Philippines, "Noriega" has the little general in limbo somewhere between clown and shrewd, menacing crook, with Hoskins using his tenacity and acute sense of irony to somehow pull this off. He captures best the contradictions of a man at once endearing and despicable.

The story is never more amusing than when Noriega and Felicidad visit Cuba. After making them wait hours for him to arrive, Fidel Castro takes them out on the town to a nightclub, and after lecturing Noriega at length about offending Colombian drug kingpins, stiffs his stunned fellow dictator for the check.

It is never uglier than when showing Noriega's barbaric reprisals against the army officers behind a failed coup meant to topple him. "Without power, I do not exist," he says later.

Much of that power was payment from the U.S., who supported and enriched him when that served its interests, only to roll him over when his outlandish embarrassments eclipsed his value. If Showtime's Noriega is over the top, so was the original.