This was not a traditional movie; it was more of a prank show interspersed with some plot. I have not seen the first Borat, but I assume it was similar. This movie was very messed up, but it was filled with laughs as well. I cannot say that it was good per say, especially not in a traditional movie sense, but for what it was, it met those expectations. Sacha Baron Cohen originally had his rise to fame doing pranks in Britain, but he became too well known, so he shifted his sights to America. He has had major roles in some films, like Talladega Nights, and he was just one of the major players in Trial of the Chicago 7. His performance in both of those movies was great, but this film cannot be compared to either of those.
So there was some plot to this movie, it was not a compelling story, but it was there. Borat leaves his country to travel to America to deliver a gift to Mike Pence, and that gift was an incredibly famous monkey in Kazakhstan. Once he lands in America, he found out that his daughter had snuck into the box shipping the monkey, and she ate the monkey on the way over, so she became the gift for Mike Pence. Borat attempted to give her to Pence at a CPAC convention for the Republicans, but this failed and ended with him being escorted out by security, his Trump disguise had failed. After lots of consideration of other options, they decide that Borat’s daughter will be delivered to Rudy Giuliani, and if you watched the news the day the movie was released, then you know that he was more successful in doing this.
This movie gave me vibes like the Impractical Jokers Movie. These people are most well known for being prankers, not necessarily movie makers. Cohen does have some good performances as mentioned, but typically it seems he does more in disguise. Where this becomes a problem is when they are trying to translate their prank talent into something that can be placed into theaters, or in this case streamed from Amazon because theaters are closed. This means that they must create some storyline for the pranks to follow to make it feel like more of a movie. The Impractical Jokers did a terrible job of this. In their movie the story line revolved around Paula Abdul and fixing a wrong that had been done to her, but the pranks do not really line up to it other than the person who lost cannot go see her. So, at least the story line for the sequel of Borat lined up to the pranks that were occurring for the most part, and they aligned well to the current climate considering the amount of Covid discourse in the film, and the large focus on the upcoming election. This means it might not age as well as the first one though, because it was so specific. Basically, movies like this are very similar to watching a compilation of prank videos on YouTube.
When it came to the ending of the movie, it was partially ruined the day it came out. The news started to break about how bad Giuliani came across. The climax of the movie, no pun intended, was when Giuliani and Borat’s daughter were in the hotel room doing an interview, and during a break in the interview the daughter takes him back to the bedroom for a drink, and it seems like things were escalating very quickly, when Borat barges into the room to save his daughter. In the movie she was supposed to be 15, but in real life she is 24, so when watching the movie in the mind of the viewer Giuliani was being seduced by someone under age, but in real life she was of age, but she is still much younger than him. Also at this point in the movie she does not look that young at all, she had gone through her Instagram model transformation, and she looked similar to what other reporters might look like. Either way it seemed to make Giuliani look bad.
This movie obviously has a large amount of political satire to it, which some people will definitely find offensive or infuriating based off of their political beliefs, even though it was one massive joke, but there definitely was some material that pushed the boundaries of comedy. The biggest area of this came in the form of antisemitic jokes. In culture now a days, people have been canceled for a variety of different comments or actions that they had done in their past, or recently. It has gotten to the point where many comedians have become worried about some of the jokes that they make that they might be canceled even though they feel like they are just doing their job. In this movie, Borat is constantly crossing the line of appropriate, but it does not seem like he has been canceled. All the actions he takes through out the movie seem to just be poking fun at those that have the outrageous beliefs he portrays, so his reputation stays relatively safe. There will obviously be many people that will watch this movie and find it completely distasteful and not see the comedy in it at all, but at the end of the day I do not truly think he means any harm, he was just trying to expose how messed some people in this country are, and how passive others are to injustices.
Many of these ideas come back to what the documentary the Social Dilemma was talking about. The algorithm of these search engines and social media start to only put out information based off of a persons previous searches, so instead of helping to eliminate biases, these companies start increasing the biases even more to the point where in some cases it has actually become dangerous. The documentary does a better job of pointing this out, but in Borat, when he was in the cabin with the two guys, clearly they were not getting any alternative source of news other than some of the political conspiracies that have been put out, so companies like Google and Facebook need to find a way to emphasize more nonpartisan sources.
Also the fact that there has become such a massive influx in media that can be consumed monoculture has slowly begun to die. This means that someone like Cohen can continue to flourish. When the lines of media were more mainstream, and everyone watched the same programming, it became too easy for people to recognize Cohen and other pranksters. Now there is so much media to consume that it has become more possible for Cohen and people like him to fly under the radar. They did take some time at the beginning of the movie to show that there were people who did recognize him on the street, so it does limit the number of pranks he could do. This has also been proven true for the Impractical Jokers. So it seemed like many of the people that Cohen focused on pranking were in the older demographic because they were the least likely to recognize him and know who he was.
This was not your typical movie, but it did seem to accomplish the goals it set out to do. Cohen created another controversial comedy that pointed out some of the worst people in society, and that there are truly people out there that believe in some crazy conspiracies, and that there are others that are still very biased against those of a different race than them. It did show some amount of redeeming humanity in the form of the woman who he left his daughter to be baby sat by, but other than that he seemed to focus in on those that had more corrupt ideas. I gave this movie a 67, but I would recommend watching it. It got such a low rating because it just does not fit into the format of a normal movie, but it did provide many laughs, especially if as the viewer the political satire is not taken seriously.
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