‘Borat’ sequel earns a high-five
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm Rated: R for pervasive strong crude and sexual content, graphic nudity and language. Running time: 95 minutes. Available on Amazon Prime starting Friday, Oct. 23. 666out of 4
Two things to know about “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”: It is appalling. And I haven’t laughed this hard at anything in months.
Laugh isn’t even the right word. Other movies make you laugh. This movie causes spasms. You may forget to breathe. There may be tears. At its best — and it’s at its best six or seven times over the course of 90 minutes — “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” is jaw-droppingly, eye-poppingly, suffocatingly hilarious.
Fourteen years ago, in “Borat,” Sacha Baron Cohen took cringe comedy as far as it could go. But “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” goes even farther. It’s a harsher, nastier movie for a harsher, nastier country. At times, the
movie is just repellent. At times, it’s awkward and not funny. Some moments don’t work. But when it does …
In this new version, available to stream on Amazon Prime on Friday, Borat (Baron Cohen) is let out of a Kazakhstan prison, where he has been doing hard labor for embarrassing his country. He is sent to America on a diplomatic mission to garner favor with the Trump administration. His assignment is to
present a monkey to Vice President Mike Pence. When the monkey plan goes awry, Borat decides instead to present his 15-year-old daughter as a sex slave for Pence, because he’s read that Pence is such a wild man he can’t trust himself to be alone with women.
The daughter is played by Irina Novak (though some reports claim the character is played by actress Maria Bakalova). Novak is as funny
as Baron Cohen, with a preternatural capacity for keeping a straight face. In what is bound to be the most talked about scene in the film, she poses as a journalist for Kazakh television and interviews Rudolph Giuliani.
It’s embarrassing. Giuliani is charmed by her — he’s actually rather kind to her — and she acts like an adoring fan. In the interview, he says insane things, like the Chinese invented the coronavirus and deliberately spread it throughout the world. When it’s over, she invites him into the bedroom for a drink. He lies on the bed and is reaching into his trousers when Baron Cohen, dressed in a bra and panties, enters shouting, “She’s 15! She’s too old for you!” As Giuliani hurries away, Baron Cohen insists that Giuliani have sex with him instead.
So, this is the kind of comedy we’re talking about — funny, but sometimes hard to watch.
For the first “Borat,” Baron Cohen was unknown and could fool people into thinking he was a real foreign journalist. He can’t do that this time. At one point, he walks down a street in Manhattan, and everyone recognizes him. To get around that, Borat disguises himself.
As in the previous film, Borat travels to the South and to middle America. The idea is that he wants to make his daughter more physically appealing, so as to please Pence. This takes him into a beauty salon, where the daughter mistakes a lipstick for food and eats it, as well as to the office of a plastic surgeon.
In one amazing sequence, the daughter accidentally swallows a tiny plastic baby that’s on top of a cupcake and then goes to a women’s health clinic to have it removed. The pastor there misunderstands and believes that she’s there for an abortion and that she has become pregnant by her father. In an even more can’tbelieve-this-is-happening scene, Borat presents his daughter at a debutante ball, where the two perform a “fertility dance.” I can’t even say what happens next.
As in “Borat,” Baron Cohen exposes the uglier sides of America. When the coronavirus hits, he spends five days under the same roof with two middle-aged guys, who seem like decent fellows, but they tell him that Hillary Clinton drinks the blood of children. Later, they all go to a gun show, where Borat, accompanied by a band, performs a song about how Barack Obama should be injected with the virus — and the crowd goes wild. (According to reports, however, the crowd eventually figured out they were being mocked, and Baron Cohen barely escaped.)