A heartwarming display of American ignorance.
Fourteen years after Borat successfully shocked us, embodying the lazy assumptions and prejudices that the West holds towards the rest of the world, Sacha Baron Cohen returns to a landscape permanently altered by the apocalyptic combo of Trump and the coronavirus. It’s comforting to see the character return, even if the joke is beginning to feel a bit stale. Here to freshen up the act (and avoid the obstacle of Cohen’s fame) is Maria Bakalova, playing Borat’s brainwashed daughter, Tutar, who slowly adopts Tomi Lahren’s version of female empowerment in her voyage through America. In the original film, Borat’s narrative functioned as a loose framework, to hold the hilarious pranks together; in Borat Subsequent Movie Film, the pranks feel somewhat secondary to the narrative, with a few standout scenes displaying Cohen’s signature brilliance. But times have changed; it’s much harder to shock the audience, after everything we’ve seen over the last few years. There’s no longer any need to expose hidden bigotry – it’s all out in the open, manifesting in displays of delusion that overshadow even the fictional traditions of Kazakhstan. Not all of the jokes land, due to the ever-increasing absurdity of Donald Trump, pushing even a genius like Cohen into repeating the same tired schtick that Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers seem permanently stuck on.
