It doesn’t seem like it’s been fourteen years, but Sacha Baron Cohen returns with this surprise sequel to the hilarious Borat. It’s a testament to how screwed up the world (or at least our country) is that Cohen could go around pranking famous folks, crashing Republican conventions, and generally causing mayhem for the past few months and it didn’t even cause a blip on the radar. While I can’t say it’s as good as the original (or even Bruno, my personal favorite Cohen movie), it did provide me with some much-needed laughs while simultaneously reminding me what a shitshow 2020 has been.
After soiling his country’s name in the first movie, Borat (Cohen) has been wasting away in a gulag in Kazakhstan for fourteen years. Eventually, he is given a chance to redeem himself by delivering a monkey to Mike Pence as a goodwill gesture from his country. When the monkey comes to an untimely end, he decides to hand over his fifteen-year-old daughter (Maria Bakalova) to Pence. That attempt fails, so he tries to deliver her to Rudy Giuliani.
Cohen is able to get around the fact that everyone knows who Borat is by disguising himself in a variety of outrageous costumes. While many of these scenes offer some very big laughs, some of the interactions fall flat due to the participants being all-too eager to play along with the gag. Even then, the setups alone are frequently hilarious. The best bits include Borat taking his daughter to a pro-life clinic to “get a baby out”, a disgusting “fertility dance”, and the much-publicized scene where Giuliani gets into a compromising position. It’s enough to make you wonder how far it wouldn’t gone if Cohen allowed the bit to play out even longer.
In all honesty, some of the stunts feel forced and/or overly staged. Others are half-baked or look like they might’ve been partially botched. Even then, Cohen’s gift for ad-libbing carries the weakest sequences and ensures there will still be plenty of laughs to be had. I don’t know if he could ever get away with being Borat a third time, but I’ll sure as hell be there for it. Very nice!
AKA: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. AKA: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Gift of Pornographic Monkey to Vice Premiere Mikhael Pence to Make Benefit Recently Diminished Nation of Kazakhstan.
No comments:
Post a Comment