Directed by: Jason Woliner
Starring: Sacha Baron Cohen, Maria Bakalova, Rudy Giuliani
One of Sacha Baron Cohen's signature characters returns after a fourteen-year hiatus in a sequel filmed in part during the COVID-19 pandemic. With two weeks left before the 2020 presidential election finally arrives, Borat Subsequent Movie Film drops on Amazon Prime in hopes of showing America at its ugliest. This is a case of too little, too late. We have seen America at its worst for the past five years every day as part of the 24-hour news cycle which moves so swiftly we forget yesterday's news yesterday. Borat uncovers the ignorance of Americans who believe the Clintons run a secret pedophile ring from the back of a pizza shop (and slaughter children and drink their blood) and the foolhardy belief that the coronavirus was created in a lab and spread across the world. Borat has some fun with this notion in a plot twist, but these revelations are old hat. These ignoramuses are covered by legitimate news organizations time and again. Borat adds nothing new to the mix. We've seen this enough.
Borat, the Kazakhstan journalist whose beliefs in a woman's place in the world and antisemitism are as backward as the country depicted here. I am sure the real Kazakhstan is nowhere near as third world as the movies suggest, but when he returns to America years after disgracing his home country with the documentary he made in the first film, he finds he's right at home with likeminded individuals. His mission, as ordered by the nation's new premier, is to give his fifteen-year-old daughter Tutar (Bakalova) as a gift to Donald Trump in hopes it will elevate Kazakhstan on the world stage. Trump is hard to get to, so Borat floats the idea of giving his daughter to Mike Pence. When that fails, he settles for Rudy Guiliani, and the controversial payoff is sufficiently creepy. Cohen insists Guiliani's behavior is not at all staged. You'll have to see for yourself. If it isn't staged, then Guiliani is a fool. If it is staged, then Guiliani has found another way to further sully his now-damaged reputation. I recall him in Fear City, the recent documentary about the successful federal prosecution of the mob. He was intelligent and thoughtful there. How did he become such a dumpster fire of a person now?
Borat is in the movie, but because of his fame (and infamy), he wears disguises for a lot of the movie, so those who like the traditional Borat will be disappointed. He delivers the signature "high five" and "great success" lines, but they, like the rest of the movie, feels like old hat right about now. When Borat is not "exposing" the buffoonery of people, or outright shocking them with his (and Tutar's) wildly inappropriate dance at a debutante ball while Tutar is having her period, he is slogging his way through a plot in which his daughter discovers she has rights and chooses not to behave the way her country (and father) has conditioned her to. It is here where Borat Subsequent Movie Film goes all gooey and sentimental (much like Cohen's unsuccessful Bruno) and it all doesn't fit.
An immense talent like Cohen is long past having to play his characters from Da Ali G Show again. I suppose he felt the time was right for a Borat return and the quasi-documentary filmmaking style thrusting people's ignorance and unfounded prejudices onto a public which probably has already had its fill of such harebrained ideas. It's difficult to swallow that some of these scenes were filmed without the subjects knowing it was a film, but still I can't blame Cohen for giving Borat another go. After watching this incarnation of the character, however, it's mostly been there, done that.
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