Cert – 15, Run-time – 1 hour 23 minutes, Director – Sacha Baron Cohen
Discovering his girlfriend (Morgana Robinson) is eight months pregnant, Ali G (Sacha Baron Cohen) travels to America to pursue the riches of a third TV series, however forces are out to cancel him for cultural appropriation.
Ali G: Who Iz I? opens with a quote from Voltaire, “those who can make you believe absurdities can also make you believe atrocities.” The problem is it feels as if the film doesn’t trust the viewers to follow along with this and so puts reminders up in the opening credits, and then throughout the film, that a number of the figures we see throughout aren’t actors, or in on the joke. It’s a distracting set of notices that particularly in the third act feel completely unnecessary. These signs weren’t needed 20 years ago in Borat, or in any other mockumentary appearance from Ali G, so why are they needed now?
While in that mockumentary vein the film feels different to previous Sacha Baron Cohen flicks in the genre. With the direction the final set of stunts go, and how much he plays up the three characters he plays here it almost feels as if he’s trying to do something in the punchy, jugular-grabbing directness vein of South Park, without getting that the show works in part because the world has already explained what’s happening.
Ali G (Baron Cohen) learns that his girlfriend Julie (Morgana Robinson) is eight months pregnant at the same time as receiving a third series commission from HBO after Da Ali G Show was cancelled over 20 years before. To make for a better life, and claim his riches, he travels to America where his return isn’t welcomed by all – particularly super liberal lecturer Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello (also Baron Cohen), a character returning from the director and star’s 2018 TV series Who Is America? who is trying to cancel Ali G for cultural appropriation. His strand grows and plays out almost equally alongside the main events, also bringing in another Who Is America? character, Israeli anti-terrorist agent Erran Morad (Baron Cohen again).
This is a busy film, and there’s a lot of purely scripted sequences playing out between the stunts and sketches with unsuspecting politicians and members of the public. The problem is both sides get barely any laughs. A sequence halfway through that sees the lead trying to make a public apology gains a few laughs for its commitment to making things worse but there’s little laughter either side of it, aside from some old interview footage in the opening stages.
There’s an awareness and knowledge that Ali G is a character that just doesn’t work in this day and age, Baron Cohen has admitted this in recent years, possibly even while formulating this film, but how the film leans into that backfires. Partly each strand seems to disturb the flow of the others but also because the politics, particularly Dr Nira’s overplayed segments, are so emphasised that it once again feels as if the film doesn’t trust the audience to get the point or follow along. In later stages it effectively spells out, or literally says, what the point is out loud. Maybe it’s just to those who don’t know they’re part of a prank, but it feels to those watching as well.
Segments and interviews that work the best are those that feel most individual, that play into the responses of those witnessing Baron Cohen’s characters rather than the comedic character that’s steering the conversation and getting certain responses out. Borat, Ali G and other such characters have, yes, been funny and gained laughs themselves, but it’s as much about the shock and bafflement of the crowd around them. That doesn’t quite work here when the shock comes more from the hate and discrimination expressed by a number of the non-actors in the film. Yet, at the end of the day it feels like a number of these ideas could have been better tooled to a second series of Who Is America? rather than a film that feels made up of a good deal of insert dialogue to push a plot and build-up to an elaborately staged final stunt that’s bogged down by not just letting the audience follow along.
By reminding the audience who isn’t an actor and directly saying what’s happening, or should be felt, Ali G: Who Iz I? seems to not trust those watching, losing laughs in its tangled, overplayed process.
