Directors: Sacha Baron Cohen
Writers: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, Dan Swimer, Dan Mazer, Keisha Zollar
Stars: Sacha Baron Cohen, Morgana Robinson, George Santos
Synopsis: When Ali G discovers that his long-term girlfriend is 8 months pregnant, he ends his 20-year nap and heads to America to reclaim his former glory and earn some “cashmoney”. This turns out to be far from the formality he expected.
Sacha Baron Cohen is washed beyond belief. That’s clear when you watch the lazy, painfully unfunny Ali G: Who Iz I? A comedy pioneer who wasn’t afraid to push buttons and ridicule key political figures in the United States (Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani, among others), Baron Cohen has now become the very thing he allegedly detests in this grotesque portrait of “woke” America that might have been transgressive if it were released in 1998 but now feels completely dated and devoid of any real bite.
Ali G has never been an interesting character – his offshoots Borat Sagdiyev and Brüno Gerhard are far funnier and actively have something to say beyond the obvious caricatures he’s parodying at. Baron Cohen has never shied away from controversy, and has actively embraced it, but this latest iteration in the world of Da Ali G Show might vindicate his biggest detractors. The movie is stitched together unimaginatively, as its titular character goes to America hoping his 2004 HBO deal is still valid. However, when talking to boss Casey Bloys (the one and only), the deal is actually null and void.
Ali and his longterm girlfriend Julie (Morgana Robinson), who is now pregnant, are now stuck in Los Angeles with no money and zero opportunities. That is, until Ali has the brilliant idea to reboot his show on TikTok and become an influencer, much to the dismay of liberal lecturer Dr. Nira Cain N’Degeocello (also played by Sacha Baron Cohen). The left-leaning professor devises a plan to get Ali canceled by enlisting former Mossad agent Erran Morad (also played by Sacha Baron Cohen, crossing over between Da Ali G Show and Who Is America?) to permanently get rid of him and Julie’s unborn baby.
There’s a bigger narrative à la The Dictator, interspersed with hidden camera pranks, and none of them are ingenious or remotely funny. Baron Cohen didn’t use to be this boring, but one can clearly see that he’s had enough of this schtick. The way he delivers his lines as Ali G (or any other character he portrays) makes him look like he desperately wants to do anything else. The screenplay by six credited writers can’t even muster the same nail-biting provocations found in his previous comedies, especially when he repeats the same types of set-ups he used in both Borat and Brüno.
One of Baron Cohen’s classic bits is how he groups a bunch of people together in the same room to make them watch the most button-pushing things imaginable. It can often yield surprisingly funny reactions, no matter how in bad taste his humor is. This is mostly evident in Brüno, when he makes a focus group watch a pilot of his “TV show,” and it purposefully provokes the right people. It’s one of Baron Cohen’s funniest bits. He repeats it in Ali G: Who Iz I? by conveying a group of religious leaders to view an apology video, which might have also been funny if it weren’t filled with endless AI slop, from deepfakes of Nelson Mandela, O.J. Simpson, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Greta Thunberg, Tupac Shakur, The Notorious B.I.G., Greta Thunberg, and Adolf Hitler, among others. It’s painful, and goes on forever. None of it is creative. A complete reversal of who Baron Cohen once was in the eyes of the public, and the biggest testament to how washed he’s become as a provocateur.
Another bit is when Ali G, after being canceled on TikTok, becomes the poster boy for the anti-woke movement by becoming the host of the alt-right “The Free Speech Show.” In isolation, this brings him back to the days of Da Ali G Show, where he recorded his jokes in front of a television audience. But the same bite that used to characterize his comedy is nowhere to be found, even if he makes disgraced Republican congressman George Santos play a Holocaust game and makes him do the Nazi salute, à la Elon Musk. The only remotely funny bit in that whole film is where he leaves former political candidate Kari Lake hanging, but that joke is also dated.
There’s also an extended bit where Baron Cohen convinces Newt Gingrich and a bunch of other pro-Trump figures that Ali G is an immigrant to eliminate, which leads to a climax that is neither funny nor particularly memorable. By that point, though, most of us have checked out of a movie that we desperately want to put out of its misery. There isn’t anything that Baron Cohen didn’t do that justifies us subjecting ourselves to this wannabe Matt Walsh that fails to criticize anything meaningful about the current state of the U.S.A., which hasn’t even changed that much ever since he made Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.
It did now, given the midterm results, but Ali G: Who Iz I? arrives in an era where most, if not all, want to put this hack in the rearview mirror and never think about him again. One wonders why Amazon swiftly changed its release plans and dumped it on Prime Video after a two-day theatrical run. But I wonder how people are still falling for his schticks. He is the most recognizable comedian in the world, and he’s been doing this for more than twenty years. How can they fall for it? Oh, gee, a new disguise! Everyone should recognize his face by now. And everyone should stop paying attention to this so-called comedian who still refuses to evolve and now gives us unwatchable pieces of booyakash*t like this one.
