BORAT SUBSEQUENT FILM
Amazon Studios
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: Jason Woliner
Writers: Sacha Baron Cohen & Anthony Hines & Dan Swimmer & Peter Baynham & Erica Rivinoja & Dan Mazer & Jena Friedman & Lee Kern
Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Maria Bakalova
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 10/20/20
Opens: October 23, 2020
“Borat Subsequent Film” is subsequent to “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation Kazakhstan.” It’s difficult to believe fourteen years have passed from the film that at least one journalist thinks is the funniest movie ever made. If this is your first trip to Kazakhstan, movie-wise, you will probably be more delighted than those of us who are veteran “Borat” fans, but if you’re not new to the genre (simply calling it “comedy” would not do justice to such an original), you will find the gags more predictable and less amusing. And the gags come thick and fast thanks to the genius of Sasha Baron Cohen in the title role, a fellow who is Jewish and tends to speak Hebrew a lot in the film as he is probably more versed in the language than he is in Kazakh or even Tatar. Why is it significant to note that Boris is Jewish? Chances are if he were not, he would not get away with some depictions of anti-Semitic humor, all of which are really a send-up of slogans and faux-philosophies that blame Jews for everything.
The loose plot, serving as a foundation for a series of vaudeville-like comedy both verbal and physical, finds the title character (Sasha Baron Cohen) ordered by the Kazakh ministry to go to the U.S. and deliver the gift of a monkey named Johnny to Vice President Mike Pence. His fifteen-year-old daughter Sandra Sarah Parker Sagiyev (Maria Bakalova) has smuggled herself out of the country in a large box meant for Johnny, and what’s more has eaten the monkey (though she insists the animal had eaten himself). Borat notes that the monkey is “not as alive as he used to be.” The gift idea has changed: Sandra is to be given as a gift to a former mayor of a large U.S. city, but first she has to get out of those peasant clothes, color her hair blond, and learn how to out as a big-city journalist that would convince people in both Washington DC and deep into Trump country.
During the odyssey of this odd couple, they visit a baker who inscribes a greeting on the cake, a slogan that begins to make some people nervous as similar actions did in the original movie. What if some people watching the movie take everything seriously, their ethnic prejudices catered to? She decides that she needs a larger bosom or she would not be worthy of a man, and visits a plastic surgeon who does not approve of simply putting potatoes inside her blouse. (He probably could not charge $21,000 for that.) She upsets a debutante ball in Macon, Georgia with the kind of dance you would not expect among Republican woman and is clued in by Luenell (Luenell) about how to act like a confident woman who does not need a larger breast in the film’s most sensible celluloid.
The physical humor finds Cohen dressed in a bikini, with a fake (I think) phallus, and in a succession of disguises that introduces a fellow with a nose longer than Pinocchio’s (two women in the synagogue try to prove that Jews do not necessarily have long shnozzes) and a guy with a large beard who encourages a crowd of rural folks to sing a racist song. (Again: what if members of the movie audience are literal folks without a sense of irony?)
“Borat 2” was written by eight people which might qualify for the Guinness Book of World Records and looks it. The sketches are sufficiently different, albeit delightfully vulgar (not so charming to Republican women, perhaps), always fitting right into this mockumentary. Jason Woliner has a stack of TV episodes in his résumé but for him this is a refreshing, funny, vulgar, satiric sendup of Americans who believe everything they hear and Americans who probably do not. This is also the freshman performance of Irina Novak who can persuade you that she can play a village maid from a backward country and a sophisticated feminist that could be a New York TV journalist.
95 minutes. © 2020 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – B
Acting – B+
Technical – B
Overall – B