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Borat Subsequent MovieFilm Movie Review

Borat Subsequent MovieFilm is a 2020 mockumentary comedy film directed by Jason Woliner and starring Sasha Baron Cohen and Maria Bakalova. It’s such a bad movie.

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“These gypsy tears will keep you safe“

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Released from prison for bringing shame to his country, Kazakh funnyman Borat risks life when he returns to America with his 15-year-old daughter. He sets out to give her as a gift to Mike Pence, but along the way she realizes she can be more than that and she becomes a strong woman. Yes, let’s first get that out of the way. This is a feminist film. What?! Are you f***ing kidding me? I know that Hollywood has to make every second film today into a feminist movie, but this is Borat for crying out loud. His movie shouldn’t be a feminist picture as it just doesn’t mash well.

That is only one of many problems that this sequel has. I have to praise Maria Bakalova for her performance as his daughter. This unknown Bulgarian actress will hopefully make it big in the industry after this phenomenal performance where she surprised everybody with her immense talent. And yes, the character works as her arc is strongly developed and inspirational. But again, I have to repeat myself – this is a Borat movie, so no matter how well they execute her arc, it shouldn’t be here at all. It just felt wrong, especially in the mid act where she suddenly became the protagonist and Borat was almost entirely missing. The structure is terrible here.

Sasha Baron Cohen is much weaker himself this time around and this iconic character just doesn’t feel fresh anymore. Most of his fun qualities were stripped away from him and those that remained were repeated throughout, resulting in a boring, repetitious viewing experience.

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Let’s talk about politics. It is hypocritical from Cohen to get back to this character after so many years, fourteen to be exact, only at the time of the election and to make fun of Republicans and Trump supporters. Words cannot describe the biases of this film that needs to be seen to be believed. The obvious example is when he hangs around Trump supporters who are these hateful, stupid rednecks, so he just found the worst of the bunch and made fun of them, but of course Antifa is nowhere to be found, only anti-maskers etc. It’s the most manipulative and politicized Hollywood movie in quite a while and it was just shameless to witness.

However, Borat Subsequent MovieFilm is objectively a bad movie, not because of its politics with which I disagree strongly myself. I can laugh at anything and to me everything is fair game when it comes to humor, but that’s the problem – none of it was funny. Well, almost nothing. I did like a couple of scenes. That ridiculous correspondence between Azamat and Borat was hilarious. I also liked that joke about Melania and Slovenia, though even that joke was stupid having in mind that Slovenia is a much less problematic country than the US, but I liked the fairy tale framing, that worked for me.

But every other scene was not funny in any shape or form. The Rudy Giuliani segment was more sad and uncomfortable than amusing, the Mike Pence scene was a total fiasco and all of the other scenes, especially in the second half with the political meetings were simply not funny. Gone were the jokes and everything was so obvious. At times it even felt like a true documentary instead of a mockumentary, and that was tragic.

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Borat Subsequent MovieFilm is one of the worst comedy sequels of all time. I absolutely hated this movie and what it stands for. It has some funny scenes: Princess Melania jokes and the Borat-Azamat correspondence come to mind. But everything else was simply unfunny. Maria Bakalova is simply fantastic as Borat’s daughter and her arc is strong, but I don’t want his freaking daughter in this movie. A Borat movie becoming a feminist film in its entire second act was just a terrible choice that stripped the film of any humor or freedom to do anything in the process. Cohen filming this sequel just in front of the elections was shamelessly manipulative and the movie is clearly horribly biased in its politics, but even that would have been okay had those scenes been funny, and they simply were not. Most of the second half bored me how uninteresting, unsophisticated and utterly devoid of jokes it all felt. At the end of the day, there was just one moment where in my head I was finished with this movie and nothing could have saved it at that point – seeing Borat basically get sensitivity training to not be anti-Semitic anymore was a tragic sight to behold as it presented by far the biggest personification of political correctness destroying the American comedy in front of our very eyes. So congratulations to you, Hollywood, you didn’t just destroy this iconic character, but you’ve also annihilated the comedy genre as a whole. Great job. You f***ing did it.

My Rating – 2