Critics reviews

It's fun to see contrary storytelling impulses layered on top of each other, even when (or maybe because) it's hard to tell how much you're supposed to accept at face value, and how much is a put-on.

Ultimately, perhaps unexpectedly, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm offers more proof of Sacha Baron Cohen’s admirably serious comic evolution, as well as of Borat’s enduring ability (and this will make more sense once you’ve seen the film) to go viral.

Cohen seems to understand that the film’s shock value is automatically lower because of how deadened audiences have grown to political satire, so he relies more heavily on sitcom jokes to compensate and largely succeeds.

The sequel is somehow both lighter and darker in tone than its predecessor – which suits the current mood, perhaps. Moments of pure slapstick come as a relief.

In the main, the humor driving "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm" is a continuation of what Baron Cohen does in his 2018 Showtime series "Who Is America?" – which his to say that he functions more as a prodding force these days than a hard crowbar.

In a sense, the Borat movies are about a grifter, too, though trying to parse whether Borat or Baron Cohen is the true con artist is the kind of thought experiment that will tie your gray matter in knots.

I laughed and laughed through every joke of questionable taste and possible rudeness in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. And then I laughed some more. Some of this was bitter laughter... [as it] reveals ugly and unruly truths about contemporary American culture.

The sequel is both ruder and more sentimental, but there are payoffs in handling the father/daughter relationship semi-sincerely. Filmed in the earlier stages of the pandemic, the America we see in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” amounts to a largely maskless, QAnon-believing, science-denying idiocracy.

Some of the set-ups either fall flat (a riff that has Borat sending SMSs via fax gets tired fast) or miss the mark entirely (an encounter with a Holocaust survivor).

If Trump didn’t exist, Baron Cohen would have been forced to invent him. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm may not quite deliver the lightning bolt of the original, but it makes for a nice cinematic October surprise as America heads to the polls.

You emerge from the movie riddled with teeth marks, wanting to spoil it all (the synagogue scene! the toilet birth! the iPhone porn!), but let’s not. What can be said is that it’s all here... A psychotic tangle of headlines and political dilemmas as impenetrable as a clump of extension cords that we all can’t help but trip over.

It’s amusing enough to watch Giuliani scramble for the exit when Borat thunders into the hotel room in a pink leotard, but the laughter seldom swells to the gales of appalled glee that the best Baron Cohen provocations tend to elicit, and only a couple of skits fall into the gobsmacking bracket.