To give you a little backstory: I was 14 years old in 2006, and I had been a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen’s work for at least 2 or 3 years at that point. I had a Borat t-shirt I got at Hot Topic (that I still have), and I had a poster in my room up. When the Borat movie finally came out, there was a unique kind of energy in the air that doesn’t really exist anymore: the DVDs for Da Ali G Show were a cult thing at first, slowly gaining acceptance from everyone as each character became these big cultural figures. We were all big fans of Borat and familiar with his personality, etc (this was back in the days when you literally had to watch it on television or get the DVDs, torrenting wasn’t as much of a thing as it is now), expectations were high, and they were surpassed tenfold. At that point, Sacha Baron Cohen had been doing the character for years, he was in peak performance as an actor, and the movie (or “moviefilm” haha) was the absolute limit of where the character could go.
Seeing the first Borat film (I hate that I have to say “the first” now) is, to this day, one of the most magical moments of my life: the place was packed, the movie was sold out, and it was some of the hardest laughter I’ve ever heard from humans before or since. Whenever I hear arguments about how the “theatrical experience is dead,” I always remember that screening fondly. This was the year right before the first iPhone was ever released, and things felt a lot more innocent. Back then, you couldn’t just go on Twitter and have immediate access to comments about the movie (like the Giuliani scene was spoiled for everyone). You also couldn’t really download it or anything like that, the only way to see it was to physically get your ass out to a movie theatre with other hardcore Borat fans, otherwise you’d be missing out on Monday when everyone was joking about it.
The movie was so great, in the 14 years that followed, the “Borat voice” never really left. It’s still constantly being referenced, and still one of the funniest movies released in years. It’s one of those creations that is so seriously hilarious it kind of feels like the universe gave it to us. In an award speech for SBC, Apatow once commented that after a screening for the film, George Meyer, a writer for The Simpsons said to him, “I feel like someone just played me Sgt. Pepper’s for the first time.” That is one of the best ways of putting it: there was something truly special about the first Borat movie. It was simply just undeniably great, everyone leaving the theatre knew we had just witnessed an instant classic.
Now, fast forward 14 years later: in the middle of a pandemic in which movie theatres are all closed, Borat 2 was released for people to watch alone at home. More than anything, it feels more sad than hilarious. First of all: right from the get-go, Cohen can’t do the voice anymore. It doesn’t sound like the same guy, it sounds like someone trying to do a Borat impression, and as the last 14 years have shown: we don’t like Borat impersonators, they’re annoying. This might sound like nitpicking, but to a big Borat fan like myself, it was noticeable immediately: the voice was off.
The thing about the first Borat film is that it felt like a transgressive work of genius that was not only funny, but also a great documentary about America. By pretending to be a clueless foreigner, Cohen (an intelligent foreigner himself in real life) was able to get people to say how they really felt, magnifying the dirty underbelly of America, putting dick jokes in the mix so you didn’t really notice how smart it was. In 2020, it feels like a Borat film is unnecessary: one of the main reasons the character worked back then was because people weren’t outspoken about their bigotry. Cohen has commented on this in a recent interview, “In 2005, you needed a character like Borat who was misogynist, racist, anti-Semitic to get people to reveal their inner prejudices. Now those inner prejudices are overt. Racists are proud of being racists.’’
When we saw a group of frat boys talk openly about being sexist in the first movie, for example, it was truly shocking. I still remember the gasps from a few audience members when that scene came on. Now, those types of dudes are making news all the time as incels. It’s like the shitty people from the 2000s have accelerated and become almost impossible to satirize. It’s the same thing with once great, necessary shows like South Park: in the first year of Trump’s presidency Matt Stone and Trey Parker seemed to struggle to top the absurdity of real life. The whole point of stuff like Borat and South Park in the early 2000s has almost been rendered unhelpful now due to the mainstreaming of prejudices among certain people.
That’s where Borat 2 fails to work, in my opinion. It struggled to find its footing as a piece of cultural commentary as a whole. In the same interview referenced above, Cohen said, “My aim here was not to expose racism and anti-Semitism. The aim is to make people laugh, but we reveal the dangerous slide to authoritarianism.” To me, that’s why the movie kind of doesn’t work for the most part. For one thing, it’s just not as classically funny as the first. Aside from the voice being off, shock scenes like the period blood dance come across as just plain vulgar for the sake of having an “epic gag” in a Borat sequel. You can sort of hear the writer’s room while you’re watching it: “How can we top the hotel room fight scene? What is still considered gross in 2020? Why don’t we find a way to incorporate period blood, surely that will work!” The movie feels dumb and unfocused for the first half, until covid enters the scene.
This is where I feel the movie really takes a turn for the better. I didn’t really like it, and Borat 2 doesn’t do much of importance, but where it really shines is in the last moment. It felt absolutely chilling to watch Borat go from thinking America’s the “greatest country in the world” in 2006 to the belief that “the greatest threat to Kazakhstan is no longer the Jew — it's the Yankee!” The Running of the Jew scene in the first one was one of the most appalling and talked about scenes when it came out, and to have the punchline be turned on Americans 14 years later is surreal and fitting. If the film does anything right, it’s that one scene alone. The rest of the world has been watching America with pity and disgust for the last 4 years, and Borat absolutely nailed it.
