Саша Барон Коэний шинэ бүтээл “Ali G: Who Iz I?” кино шүүмжлэгчдийн анхаарлыг татаж байна

The funniest moment in Ali G: Who Iz I?, a new comedy sequel from Sacha Baron Cohen, arrives just a couple of minutes in. The actor, reprising his decades-old role, is seen asking revered astronaut Buzz Aldrin: “Do you think man will ever walk on the sun?” Aldrin’s response is – naturally – abject bafflement. The problem? This footage is now 23 years old, ripped from the archives of Da Ali G Show. Over the subsequent 90-odd minutes, Who Iz I? fails to devise anything as funny as this fleeting, inane lick of mischief.

What we get instead is a bitter, contrived and politically reprehensible assemblage of in-the-wild skits, pitting Baron Cohen against an unwitting public, in the vein of Borat and Bruno. (His previous Ali G film, 2002’s Ali G Indahouse, was more conventionally scripted.) Who Iz I? was announced back at the end of July, and will be in cinemas for just three days this weekend – a strange release strategy for what is an equally strange film. The plot is thin, and loudly meta-referential, following Baron Cohen’s faux-rudeboy as he attempts to relaunch his showbiz career in the face of cancellation, the tide of public opinion having soured on his cartoonish cultural appropriation at some point in the past two decades.

Downplayed in the film’s marketing is the fact that Who Iz I? is also a spin-off/sequel to Baron Cohen’s largely forgotten 2018 Showtime mockumentary Who Is America?. Cohen reprises two of the characters from that here, at length. The first, Dr Nira Cain-N’Degeocello – a paunchy, white professor of African studies who serves as a grotesque parody of the imagined ultra-woke – is the film’s villain, orchestrating the efforts to “cancel” Ali G before ultimately deciding to kidnap his girlfriend, Julie (Morgana Robinson). Another Who Is America? character, the rubber-faced ex-Mossad agent Erran Morad, also appears in stretches towards the end of the film. Other than the three characters Baron Cohen plays, and Robinson, nearly everyone else in the film is, we are told, a real person unaware of the ruse.

It’s this aspect, though, that provides the sole kernel of intrigue in Who Iz I?. Baron Cohen has had some degree of success with the format before – with Borat (and, to a lesser extent, Bruno), he was able to mine striking, memorable satire from his interactions with real people. When he brought back Borat for the Covid-era straight-to-streaming sequel Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, the returns had diminished. But it was still this thorny intersection with reality that provided the biggest talking point (in that movie, an unnerving hotel room encounter involving Rudy Giuliani).

For much of this new film, the concept fails to bear fruit. Ali G is so preposterous a figure that there is nothing interesting or unexpected about the way people react to him. Often, the way they seem to abide his absurdity makes the interactions seem staged. At the very least, they have the vibe of people simply playing along with an encounter they on some level know is not sincere. Even if these people are as unwitting as the film claims, there is nothing surprising about the interactions – and surprise is, really, the whole incentive for shooting a film this way. For instance: in one scene, Ali G shows a video to a room full of religious figures (a priest, a rabbi, etc etc), to ostensibly apologise for his racial appropriation. The video quickly degenerates into a crass AI rap video, in which figures from Moses to Greta Thunberg sing Ali G’s praises. One by one, the onlookers walk out of the room in disgust. But of course they would.

But then the film reaches its third act, and Dr Nira enrols a group of real-life citizens – right-wing oddballs, to put it plainly – into what is functionally a sort of fictional militia-in-training, led by Erran Morad. He eventually gets two of these people to go along with a scheme to kidnap Julie, which they agree to. Once they do this, and take her to a safe location, she starts “giving birth”. They assist with the “delivery”, which is staged in a dark room with a prosthetic lower half. At this point, a disclaimer appears on screen reminding people that these two men are unaware that this is a fiction. After this, they steal the baby, with the intention of transporting it to Mexico so it cannot claim citizenship. The two men comply. When the “baby” is hooked up to a drone and flown hundreds of feet into the air, one of the men is encouraged to push a button on a remote, dropping the “baby” to a certain doom. The man does it.

None of this is particularly funny. (The big joke in the climax really revolves around a device resembling buttocks, and a dildo that the militia members are somehow able to believe is a high-tech lethal weapon.) But it is shocking. It is easy to assume that people like this – hardline American anti-immigration extremists – would be capable of such moral disregard, but it’s another thing entirely to see it play out on screen in comic pantomime. To some extent, the sequence justifies the whole wretched film. It is damning footage; it is a spectacle. But what else is there to say about it? Not a whole lot.

The sequence makes the film’s South Park-esque, both-sides-are-stupid approach to politics even more frustrating. The Dr Nira character in particular rankles; he is the sort of snide pastiche of progressivism you would only normally expect from the American far-right, or in webcomics shared on incel message boards. In one scene, Dr Nira tells a room full of (real, and horrified) parents that their school will be enforcing a “mandatory gender reversal year” – a position that no one has ever argued for, and would be axiomatically opposed by any actual advocate of trans rights. It’s satire, sure, but a conniving kind of satire; Baron Cohen’s targets are straw men, all.

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At another point in the film, Dr Nira is seen wearing a keffiyeh – the scarf worn in the Middle East, and sometimes worn by Americans as a show of support for Palestine. Why, then, would he bring in an ex-Mossad agent to execute his kidnapping plan? It’s a muddled sort of parody, dismantling a stereotype that just doesn’t really exist in real life.

Against the odds, Who Iz I? shows that Baron Cohen still has the power to shock. But I’m not sure what else this film has going for it. It is a film that betrays no real humanity, that sees the world as being formed of two camps: people to mock and people to dupe. If any of it was funny, that might be enough to vindicate his methods. As it stands, I iz not convinced.

‘Ali G: Who Iz I?’ is in cinemas now for one weekend only