GIRL POWER
Kazakh is back but his
HE’S back! Sacha Baron Cohen has dusted off his boxy suit and mankini to send his Kazakh reporter to investigate Donald Trump’s America.
Well, sort of. Borat caused such a stir with his 2006 film he is now hiding that Saddam Hussein moustache under a string of ridiculous disguises.
For the most outrageous stunts, Baron Cohen hands the limelight to Bulgarian comic Maria Bakalova.
She plays Borat’s 15-year-old daughter Sandra Jessica Parker Sagdiyev, “the oldest unmarried woman in Kazakhstan”.
It was Bakalova who created the early headlines when Donald
Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani blasted the film for its climactic stunt at his expense.
I suspect that’s why Amazon wanted to rush it out before the presidential election. It’s topical, but is it funny?
Well, it has its moments. Baron Cohen can still raise some horribly uncomfortable laughs.
The full title gives you the gist of the story – Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery Of Prodigious Bribe To American Regime For Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
After spending 14 years banished to a gulag for bringing disgrace to his homeland, Borat is offered a shot at redemption – a mission to curry favour with
MYSTERY: Edna with daughter Kay and her granddaughter Sam
“McDonald Trump’s” vice-president Mike Pence. After a plan to present him with Kazakhstan’s most famous chimpanzee goes awry (it’s a long story), Borat tries to make a gift of his teenage daughter, or “non-male son”.
The early stunts are mostly retreads from the first film and they aren’t as funny the second time around.
Borat gets a cake shop owner to ice an anti-Semitic message and whips up a crowd of gun-toting rednecks to sing about lynching scientists and journalists at a rally in support of
Trump. The stunts are ballsy, but they fail to shock. In 2006, Baron Cohen had to trick thick Yanks into revealing their inner Nazi. Nowadays you can hear them spouting this nonsense on the evening news.
But Bakalova’s brass neck and her quick wit still manage to carry us through to the jawdropping finale.
I suspect that the film’s editor did most of the damage in the Giuliani sequence, but it still gets a “high five” from me.