Director: Jason Woliner
Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Maria Bakalova, Dani Popescu, Tom Hanks (no, really)
Have I Seen it Before: Ah, yes, the pleasure of taking in a new movie in 2020. The movie business is hurting. Movie theaters are hurting more. Maybe there will be a new day soon when we can all be sort of annoyed by the one-two punch of being sold premium theater chain memberships and softball trivia questions. But for now, I’m glad some studios are understanding that streaming options are a good way to start digging their way out of an unfortunate hole.
But that’s not what this review is about.
Did I Like It: The element that keeps the original Borat (2006) still fresh, after the individual jokes have lost their shock value, is Cohen’s perhaps insane commitment to the bit at hand. His fearlessness cannot be duplicated, just as his catchphrases rendered his most famous character fairly neuter.
And it is clever the way we get the Kazakh journalist back, with him realizing that he has become too well-known for his previous style of antics. The man who hides behind his characters now hides behind new disguises, and we’re off to the races.
But it isn’t as fearless as it once was. There isn’t the preposterous high of Borat (Cohen) wrestling naked with Azamat Bagatov. He’s older now, and tamer, while the kind of people he is imitating and the kind of people he exposes have metastasized everywhere. The film is funny enough, and timelier than I would have expected, but I do wonder if there will be anything to see here within a couple of years.
The one thing I am struck by, and I keep coming back to in the days since viewing the film, is how life-affirming it turned out to be.
I know. I was surprised as well.
Borat himself softens a bit within a certain limitation, growing to accept his daughter (Bakalova, getting to do the kind of stealth prank work that Cohen might be too high-profile for anymore) and fitfully move his country out of their medieval views, but he is hardly a saint after the credits kick in. The real unlikely hero of this unlikely sequel is Holocaust survivor Judith Dim Evans. So many people Borat has met over the years fall to the occasion of being the worst possible example of a human being. As Borat enters her synagogue dressed as Borat’s idea of a Jew, she has absolutely earned the right to meet his nonsense with anger. Instead, she talks to Borat and meets him with love. Even Cohen can’t keep the act up against this towering pillar of humanity. It’s heartbreaking to learn she has passed away since filming her scenes for the film.
Oh, yeah. The Giuliani sequence? Far more horrifying than the news is letting you believe, and not improved at all by the fact that America’s Mayor may not know how old Tutar is supposed to be.