A Generation of Men Once Revered Him. His New Movie Is the Worst I’ve Seen in Some Time.

Movies Ali G Does Not Belong Here Anymore Sacha Baron Cohen’s characters once cast a spell, at least over men and boys. A new movie proves his heyday is long gone. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Scaachi Koul? Oct 30, 20261:53 PM Amazon MGM Studios Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Ever since You Can See Everything was released, you can practically hear all the documentary filmmakers around the world gnashing their teeth. The movie isn’t just an impressive examination of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and scammer behind Theranos, but a genre-bending, fourth-wall-breaking possible Oscar contender (in more ways than one) that has reenergized what nonfiction filmmaking can be. In mere weeks, it has reshaped what audiences (and studios, even) can expect from documentary film. Anyone releasing anything in the immediate weeks following You Can See Everything has a heady task ahead of them. But lo, here comes Sacha Baron Cohen. Six years after Borat Subsequent Moviefilm and 20 years after Borat, Cohen is back with another unscripted comedy. This time, he’s rebooted Ali G, one of his characters from his long-ago HBO show, another racist, homophobic, idiotic goon intended to skewer bigotry. Ali G, one of Cohen’s most popular characters, was a key part of his old show, a British DJ in a durag and baggy tracksuits, speaking with a Blaccent and otherwise acting like an asshole. He’s Borat, but British, and he makes fewer references to sleeping with his sister. His new movie, Ali G: Who Iz I?, had a weekend-long theatrical release before making it to Amazon Prime this week. That might sound like a pretty short window in theaters for a movie with such a big star; after all, Cohen has been on a publicity blitz around the release, showing up on 60 Minutes and on the cover of Time. “Yes, satire can offend people other than the intended targets,” he wrote in an essay for the magazine. “As someone who has opposed bigotry and injustice throughout my life and partnered with civil rights groups, I don’t recognize myself in the warped portrayal of me that I sometimes see on social media, lumped in with the bigots I lampoon.” Cohen has been making heady statements in the press around Ali G: Who Iz I? about the value of comedy in a world that seems to appreciate it less and less. But then why is his new movie so profoundly unfunny? Well, maybe you’ll find it funny if you’re delighted by the sight of Ali G in a rastacap pooping in front of a realtor. Or maybe you’ll be tickled by the sight of Rachel Dolezal as a talking head, or a briefly bamboozled Newt Gingrich. Do you think penises are funny? Oh, buddy: Do I ever have the movie for you. The plot, such as it exists, starts with Ali G moving back to “the hood”: his mother’s house in Staines-Upon-Thames, in Surrey. HBO has canceled his show, he’s broke, and his girlfriend is pregnant. Worse is that he’s about to be canceled for acting stereotypically Black, though he very obviously isn’t. Throughout the 90-minute movie (about 45 minutes too long), he tries to find his father to determine whether he’s a white guy pretending to be Black, or if he’s actually biracial. Meanwhile, Cohen as Ali G crosses paths with Cohen as other characters: Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, a parody of leftist keyboard warriors who greets a room of all-Black Oakland residents with “Namaste,” and Col. Erran Morad, a former Mossad agent, which certainly begs you to consider Cohen’s alleged alignment with pro-Israeli sentiment. The movie employs Cohen’s usual bag of tricks: forcing unsuspecting people to be in a room with him while he says more and more deranged things and, in some cases, becomes less and less clothed. But it has less of what made Borat—or the HBO Ali G—compelling unscripted television. He doesn’t focus much on humiliating the people in power by tricking them into an interview with an idiot. Now it’s about tricking people on the edges of the ideological spectrum, but without meaningful commentary. Cohen’s work has always operated best in the shadows, but now he and his characters are too famous not to be immediately clocked. What’s left is actually not much; a movie that thinks it’s breaking barriers when in fact it’s mostly enforcing them. You want me to laugh at the idea of a white guy pretending to be Black when Jack Harlow is just walking around for free? It feels almost like Cohen wants credit for helping create a kind of unscripted format. The movie starts with a reminder—in text!—that there are only a few actual actors in the movie, including Cohen. “Everybody else in the movie is real,” says a graffiti tag on a building as the movie opens, “and are not playing along.” Then there’s a Voltaire quote. Unbearable, especially from someone famous for wearing a neon one-piece bathing suit. Ali G: Who Iz I? is not outrageous enough to draw you in through sheer morbid curiosity. There’s an extended sequence in the movie where Cohen’s leftist character has sex with a drugged-beyond-comprehension Ali G (ostensibly with a body double) while a non-actor listens to it all happening in the dark. But even in this universe that Cohen created, this is … an extended rape joke? A guy who has sex with another guy, too fucked up to know that he isn’t his girlfriend? So, a gay rape joke? A gay rape joke about a guy pretending to be Black? Jackass has already moved the needle for what will make an audience gasp, so then watching Cohen ostensibly poop out Ali G’s semen after this sexual encounter is certainly gross, but not even that memorable. When the first Borat came out, casting a spell on men and boys of all ages to scream “MY WIFE” as if it was its own punch line, Cohen was still mostly unknown. His satire worked because we knew nothing about him, and so he could hide in plain sight in a character intended to shock. But now Cohen is a mainstream celebrity, and we know so much about him: We know about his divorce, about his extended use of blackface, and even about the long-standing allegations that he harassed actress Rebel Wilson on set. Besides, the world has moved on from Cohen’s heyday, and his type of comedy is no longer shocking, nor is it particularly poignant. Getting a dumb guy to say dumb things to politicians doesn’t make anyone laugh anymore; that’s just CSPAN now. Who Iz I was never going to be great, but compared to the recent slate of documentaries and unscripted movies released, it seems especially out of step. It’s impossible to watch without considering all the other recent documentaries and unscripted projects that have blown Cohen out of the water. Nathan Fielder, co-director of You Can See Everything, also comes from a comedy background, and still managed to create something funnier and more profound in his exploration of Holmes than Cohen has in his dissection of the American political and racial consciousness. Cohen is working really hard to get you to laugh. At one point, he shows you a bunch of right-wing white guys in fake penis harnesses that they have to jerk off to fire a gun that loads through the harnesses’ buttholes. (I know. I know.) But all Fielder had to do was show a woman whisking eggs weird and audiences are rolling around in the aisles of a three-hour documentary. Cohen was once a master at entering an unknowable situation with powerful people and somehow turning it on its head, both for laughs but often for some deeply serious irony. He made people look stupid by acting stupid, and that was noble work. Now, it feels like he’s the only one who doesn’t understand that we’re not laughing at him, or even with him. We’re not laughing at all. Comedy Movies Sacha Baron Cohen