Borat Subsequent Moviefilm Questions Its Own Hero’s Relevance in 2020

Sacha Baron Cohen’s Kazakhstani reporter Borat has risen from the grave to once more satirize the American system in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. But time has taken its toll on the character. When the original movie came out in 2006, he felt like a necessary vehicle for bringing out the hypocrisy and ridiculous nature of Americans unsure how to react to someone as xenophobic as Borat. In the time since, he’s devolved into a punchline of pop culture that has been tired and dated for a decade. And with so much of that xenophobia out in the open and running rampant in our current divisive times, Borat’s presence is more of a mild cultural catharsis than some scathing, edgy critique.

Sacha Baron Cohen as the iconic character in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Courtesy of Amazon Studios

Cohen dusts off the mustache and gray suit (not sure whether it’s finally been washed) to bring back Borat in all his smiling and dancing glory. Things have not gone well for the reporter since the time of the previous film—he has been labeled a traitor by his country for making Kazakhstan look like a land of fools and damning its export economy. To make amends, after having spent some time in prison camps, Borat is given a mission by his government. He must appease Vice President Mike Pence by offering a famous monkey to the Republican party. This leads to the full title of the film being revealed: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Things shift a bit from here as the film keeps reworking that title for more hilarity.

Accompanying Borat on his mission is his estranged daughter Tutar (Irina Nowak), who has grown up with aspirations of one day being wed and subservient with all the backward logic of her fictional village. The mission shifts to Borat intending to deliver Tutar as a bride to whichever top Republican he can get close to (and isn’t in prison). But she may find American life so different from her own culture that she’ll shirk her dad’s barbaric advice on women, taking in all the good and bad that comes with being a woman in America.

The film does acknowledge how Cohen appearing in public as Borat doesn’t work like it did the first time around because he’s now so easily recognized. (Even filming his 2009 film, Bruno, was a challenge due to so many people knowing the actor and the characters he portrays.) To blend in, Borat dons a plethora of disguises to better engage in bits for more believable reactions. This tactic does stick out like a sore thumb, though, since anytime he’s not in disguise, the pranks feel more obviously staged, complete with punchlines from the supposed unknowing victims.

Back in America. Courtesy of Amazon Studios

Per the established Borat setup, there are a lot of pranks filmed in which Borat and Tutar mislead others or expose their faults. It’s darkly amusing how far Cohen can probe without being questioned. Take, for example, the scene in which he enters a cake shop to request a familiar antisemitic statement be written on a cake. The baker not only agrees without question but honors his request for smiley faces as well. Borat will later hook up with some QAnon conspiracy theorists to banter about how Democrats drink the blood of children, pushing the character’s beliefs as far as he can before even the QAnon folks have to question things. One scene that already went viral a while back, and could have spoiled the hushed production of the movie had it not been for folks assuming it was a bit for the show Who Is America?, is when a disguised Cohen sings to a crowd at an antimask rally about wanting the opposition to either be chopped up or injected with “the Wuhan flu.”

But all of this is par for the course: in Da Ali Gi Show, Borat convinced a tavern of conservative Southerners to sing “Throw the Jew down the Well.” Those bits were hilarious and shocking in revealing just how awful some Americans can be. But do we really need that now? So many of the grotesque revelations that Borat once evoked from others are more out in the open than ever, so his work is incredibly easy in this department. It’s more expected now than ever to watch the routes that Cohen takes in savaging the easily duped populace who can’t bring themselves to be repulsed by placing people in cages or perpetuating horrible stereotypes. It’s a surreal normal through which Borat just sort of ambles considering most of his work is already done for him. He hardly even has to be the warm-up act and can merely hand over the microphone for his targets to stumble.

Even with this uneven catharsis, the film does bring a few grins in how it tries to spin a narrative around these chaotic times. The nudity-based shock humor wears a bit thin, but it’s at least pushed a bit further than before in Borat’s interactions with his QAnon buddies. The bits focusing on how adept Borat and Tutar are at such warped American culture are amusing, as Tutar argues her people shouldn’t be celebrating the Holocaust because Facebook told her it didn’t happen. There’s also quite a bit of cleverness in how filming not only continued during the COVID-19 pandemic but folded this aspect into the narrative for a twist ending. And there’s one particularly damning cameo by a big-name politician that is right in line with Cohen’s interviews in Who Is America? Honestly, though, the one moment that made me genuinely laugh featured Borat taking a job as a barber, showing each individual hair cut to his customers for their inspection. It’s such a silly and stupid moment and has no real commentary on anything, but it brought about the same amusement I had when Borat made a supermarket employee address every single cheese in the dairy section.

Crashing the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Courtesy of Amazon Studios

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm tries to find many ways to justify the return of its title character, but even the film itself breaks down by the end. The ending will undoubtedly bring out the reactionaries who believe Borat went “woke,” as though his antics were somehow bereft of political commentary before. It’s less about Borat wanting to be politically correct, however, and more about this character just not having enough teeth to keep up this bit, which has grown so old it’s no longer a joke. It can be fun to poke at the hideous nature of authoritarianism for laughs, but that gag can only go so far before Borat stops being a clown of the culture and starts becoming the norm for the oppressive. In that regard, this film is less of a return to form and more of a mercy killing for the figure.