Saying that 2020 has been a
very weird year would be a wee bit of an understatement. Even if you
look solely at American pop culture, this year has been wild. The
COVID-19 pandemic pretty much killed the summer blockbuster season
and is continuing to wreak havoc on Hollywood's scheduling. We've
also seen a third Bill & Ted movie three decades after the
second one, and The New Mutants finally got a theatrical
release after it was originally supposed to have been released in
2018. But perhaps most surprisingly, 2020 has seen the unexpected
return of Borat.
Yes,
Borat, the wacky Middle Eastern journalist that pretty much everyone was imitating or quoting for a lot of
2006 and 2007. He was pretty much to the early '00s what Austin
Powers was to the latter half of the '90s. But never did I expect to
see a sequel to that movie. In the aftermath of the movie's runaway success back in 2006, the character was essentially retired due to his popularity making it harder to pull off his usual antics. Besides, you can only catch lightning in a bottle once,
right?
But here we are in 2020, and I just watched Borat Subsequent Moviefilm on Amazon Prime Video. And after all this time, Borat hasn't lost a step.
Fourteen years ago, the government of Kazakhstan sent journalist Borat Sagdiyev (Sasha Baron Cohen) to the United States to film a documentary about life in America. What it got was something that went completely off the rails. The finished product ended up as a highly successful comedy in America, but turned Kazakhstan into a global laughingstock that landed Borat doing hard labor in a gulag for the rest of his life as punishment.
Nearly a decade and a half later, Kazakh Premier Nursultan Nazarbayev (Dani Popescu) pulls Borat out of the gulag and tasks him with taking "Johnny the Monkey" — a chimpanzee that is both the country's Minister of Culture and its most renowned porn star — to the United States as a gift for Vice President Mike Pence in an attempt to redeem himself and earn the country some respect.
But thanks to a rather unsettling mix-up, Borat arrives in America not with Johnny the Monkey, but his estranged 15-year-old daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova). And without Johnny the Monkey, Borat is facing execution once he returns to Kazakhstan. But a TV news report about Donald Trump's connection to Jeffrey Epstein leads to Borat reasoning that Tutar would be a much more suitable gift. Tutar herself loves the idea, wishing to become a beautiful princess like she believes Melania Trump to be. So she and her father hit the road, traveling across the country, getting to know one another better and discovering just how much the United States has changed since his last visit.
Much like the first movie, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is most certainly not for everyone. It is extremely scatological at times, and plays up questionable cultural and racial stereotypes at other times. And it never misses an opportunity to be as crude and lowbrow as possible. But the absurd behavior of its two primary characters only serves to make the awkward situations they find themselves in even more bizarre, and thus much funnier than they would've been normally.
I'll confess that I didn't know if there was a place for Borat in the year 2020. It's not that there's nothing for Sacha Baron Cohen to work with. Considering how much has been going on in America since George W. Bush was in office and the early days of the War on Terror, there's a lot more for Baron Cohen to have a jab at than he did back in 2006. But not everything is quite the same as it was back then, either. Times change, after all. Not only are quite a few of the people Borat and Tutar interact with far more subdued and understanding than the gaggle of loudmouths and weirdos seen in the first movie, but political satire is so much more common now than it was fourteen years ago. The Daily Show, John Oliver's Last Week Tonight on HBO, Alec Baldwin's appearances as Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live, and the monologues of pretty much every late night talk show, have pretty much cornered the market on it, especially since Trump's administration is such an easy target. It's low-hanging fruit, y'know?
But maybe that's not so bad after all. Instead of jingoistic doofuses and sex-crazed frat boys, we've got jackasses on Facebook and Twitter claiming the Holocaust never happened and spewing conspiracy theories and false truths about the pandemic. Those idiots rightfully should be mocked, and that's why I'm glad to see Borat's resurrection.
Watching the movie, it feels like Baron Cohen hasn't been away from his most famous character for as long as he has. He easily slips back into the role, once again playing Borat as utterly wrong and misinformed about pretty much everything, but still likable and amusing. Unless you're predisposed to disliking this style of comedy, it's not hard to enjoy Baron Cohen's performance as Borat.
And I also can't say enough good things about his costar, Maria Bakalova. As far as I know, this is the first American role for the Bulgarian actress, and I'm excited to see more of her work in the future. She and Baron Cohen have a believable, enjoyable comedic chemistry together, and Bakalova herself is quite charming in the role. Even at Tutar's most crude, naive, and backwards, Bakalova makes the character adorable in her own way. I was also impressed with how well she handled herself, stepping in for Baron Cohen in situations where people may have recognized him and ruined the bit. She handles these moments like an absolute pro, and if it leads to more roles for Bakalova, she's earned them.
I honestly thought we'd seen the end of the Borat character in 2006. I figured maybe Baron Cohen could break him out for the occasional one-off joke somewhere, like when he showed up as Ali G at the Oscars in 2016. But I think now is the perfect time for the character to have made his return. Between the ridiculous stories we've heard about the Trump administration over the last four years and the American reaction to the pandemic, we kinda needed this lovable idiot to point and laugh at the insanity of it all. And I'm right there with him on it.
Final Rating: ***½
