Borat – Subsequent Moviefilm

Title: Borat: Gift of Pornographic Monkey to Vice Premiere Mikhael Pence to Make Benefit Recently Diminished Nation of Kazakhstan.
Director: Jason Woliner.
Genre: Comedy.
Main Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Maria Bakalova.
Runtime: 95 mins.
MDb rating: 7.0/10.
My rating: 7/10.
Quick summary: Forced into a gulag following his first film and making a laughing stock of Kazakhstan, Borat Sagdiyev is sent to America once again. This time he is trying to seduce Donald Trump and Michael Pence with a gift of a famous monkey to make Kazakhstan a great nation. What could go wrong?

A generation of teenagers and young men have been saying ‘My wife!’ and, ‘Very nice!’ in homage to Borat (2006) for the last 14 years. I’m sure many women watched and enjoyed the movie too but the only people to shout, ‘My wife!’ randomly at me while intoxicated have been my male friends and male strangers if they overheard me and my drunk friends shout ‘Wa wa weewa’. The male bond is a special, stupid thing.

If sequels being as good as the first film is something you care about then you will be disappointed here. The curse of cult comedies is that their sequels always fall short. Anchorman 2, Zoolander 2 and to a lesser extent the Hangover sequels all fail to reach the extremely high bar their predecessors set. I was thoroughly disappointed with Will Ferrel and Ben Stiller’s follow ups to their outrageously funny originals. I enjoyed both sequels and laughed at the throwbacks to earlier jokes but the originality was gone. Unfortunately, Borat 2 suffers the same curse. It is still enjoyable, outrageously funny and a cutting look at modern America, but the not knowing what was about to happen was lost. We mightn’t know exactly what is going to happen in this sequel but we know it is going to be borderline controversial. Ironically, knowing it is going to be a bit mad takes the surprise away.

We are introduced to Borat’s daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova) on his return to his home village. Tutar lives in the back shed like all unmarried fifteen year old girls in Kazakhstan. She stows away on the ship that brings Borat back to America, adding a new element to his madcap adventures stateside. Bakalova is actually 24 years old, so any weird feeling you get when you witness Borat try to buy breast-enhancement surgery for his teenage daughter can be shooed away. The weird feeling you get when you see numerous old men admit their sexual interest in this child is harder to push away. Drunk dads at debutante balls and creepy former Mayors of New York show their insidious perverted sides when dealing with Tutar.

You will be laughing through the gaps in your fingers as Cohen dresses up as Donald Trump, a generic American man and the most offensive depiction of a Jewish person I have literally ever seen among other things.
The addition of Tutar Sagdiyev is a welcome one, adding a fresh element to the film that could have become tired if it was just Borat himself again.
This is a very funny movie that shouldn’t be compared to the first. It should be studied as a development of the modern world compared to 2006. Sacha Baron Cohen was not just making a pair of comedies with these movies. He was making a documentary on the beast that America has become and will continue to become in the modern world. Cohen is just trying to give us a few laughs while we gawk at a nation in turmoil.

Borat 2 is out on Amazon Prime worldwide!