2006 seems pretty quaint now, doesn’t it? Back then, YouTube and social media were in their infancy, pointing out George W. Bush’s grammatical goofs was considered strong satire, and the American public was still prone to moral outrage about explicit content in pop culture.
Obviously, things have changed. 14 years ago, Sacha Baron Cohen‘s antics in the first Borat could legitimately shock people, and the backwards prejudices he revealed in some of his subjects might have truly stunned more progressive-minded viewers. But his simpleton Kazakh reporter finds himself traversing a much different America in this sequel, fully titled Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
The conceit (cover story) this time is that Borat’s first film ruined his home country’s reputation. To restore it and curry favor with the United States, Borat is sent back to America on a mission to offer his teenage daughter (Maria Bakalova) as a gift to the U.S. President. There’s more plot than there needs to be (it is merely a setup, after all), and frankly way too many scripted scenes. Aside from the closing moments—turning some of the gags about the film's fake Kazakhstan back on Americans—these are almost uniformly unfunny.
When the movie gets to what Baron Cohen is known for—that is, using his absurd character to trick real unsuspecting public figures and civilians into revealing interviews and off-the-wall stunts—he still manages to mine a few gold nuggets. There’s one “Holy shit!” sequence you might have heard about involving a certain former big city mayor that’s as uncomfortable and disgusting as it sounds (and hilarious). Another unexpected standout has one interviewee react to Borat’s exaggerated bigotry with genuine compassion, in a moment that strums the viewer’s heartstrings just the tiniest bit. And quite a few scenes where Baron Cohen or Bakalova get their subjects to say or do something outrageous, or simply document reactions to their own bad behavior, are very funny.
Others, aren’t. Simply put, vulgarity that might have shocked us into laughing back in ’06 doesn’t seem so edgy or original in an era where cruel trolling pranks and dirty cringe humor are readily accessible on the phone in your pocket. There’s also no big brazen moment that’s so daring, dangerous, and transcendently hysterical, like the naked hotel fight in the first film or the cage fighting scene in Brüno. Even a particularly gross-out scene that’s arguably trying to continue that legacy seems pretty passé.
More worrisome, though, are the failures that are not Baron Cohen’s fault. These days, the public doesn’t need much
goading to reveal the ignorance and ugliness hiding underneath the surface; it’s right
there on the news or going viral on the regular, and its propagators (including
no less than the freaking President) aren’t shy or ashamed about it. So when
Borat, say, “tricks” an anti-mask rally full of far-right gun nuts and
conspiracy believers into singing about killing Democrats and journalists, it frankly
doesn’t sound much different from their regular rhetoric. Baron Cohen clearly aimed to mock them, but the stunt reveals little those who even cursorily
watch the news don’t know already, and he kind of just bounces off the bigots
instead of righteously humiliating them. This is an unfortunate recurring obstacle,
that his more partisan targets are inured to his schtick because they’ve
gone so far off the deep end themselves.
Baron Cohen never drops the façade onscreen, but has struck a much more serious tone out of character in the news lately. One can sort of read his for-real commentary as a tacit admission that the world has reached a point beyond even his gutsy high-wire methods. In a way, though, that arguably still gives Borat Subsequent Moviefilm value as a cultural artifact. Not so much as a daring and revealing work of satire, but as a measurement of how far society has regressed that something that was so edgy and so absurd in 2006 isn't nearly absurd enough to take on reality in 2020.
