Baron Cohen plays Ali G and two other characters in what feels like his overblown version of a "Saturday Night Live" movie. Back in the day (as he would have put it), Ali G was my favorite Sacha Baron Cohen character. In the ’90s and early 2000s, there was something exquisitely daft about his track suit and do-rag wave cap, his “street” Cockney Jafaican patois, his insanely stunted worldview and brain-dead malapropisms (“Does you think that men should marry only one woman?
Does you believe in mahogany?”), and in the more than slightly absurd Method commitment with which Baron Cohen immersed himself in the character. That said, Ali G would never have been more than an inspired sketch-comedy jape if it hadn’t been for all the politicians and public figures he interviewed — a parade of po-faced luminaries (Donald Trump, Ralph Nader, Buzz Aldrin, Christie Todd Whitman, Sam Donaldson), none of whom had any idea that they were being punked by a walking put-on. I’ll never forget the look on Pat Buchanan’s face when Ali G asked him if the U.S. had found “BLTs” in Iraq.
The joke of Ali G is that he was a maximally clueless white-bro poseur (a ripely legitimate topic for satire, since millions of white kids in Britain and the U.S. had mindlessly appropriated the style and attitude and language of hip-hop culture). But it’s a joke of its era that sits uncomfortably in the world of today. In 2026, the character of Ali G is so out of step that his presence now risks playing as an ironic nostalgic celebration of something it once – rightfully — skewered.
Except that the new movie, which Baron Cohen directed himself, isn’t like those other films. They were guerrilla comedies, more documentary than not (pundits have been drawing comparison between “You Can See Everything” and “Borat”), in which the bulk of the comedy consisted of Borat or Bruno talking to ordinary Americans, who didn’t know they were being pranked, in a way that unmasked their idiocies and prejudices. There’s some of that in “Ali G: Who Iz I?,” but it’s all fairly minor and neutral.
When Ali G’s romantic partner, Julie (Morgana Robinson), who’s pregnant with their child, attempts to purchase a mansion in Bel Air, the real-estate agent is the “straight” character (i.e., he’s not in on the joke), but he’s treated with total dignity. He’s just there to shuttle increasingly extreme messages back and forth between Ali G and Julie in what becomes a glorified comedy routine. There’s a scene with a liquor-store salesman who, likewise, isn’t the butt of the joke.
And there are several scenes in which Baron Cohen, in character, talks to groups of people sitting in rows in meeting rooms — and what he says is so appalling that they walk out, or simply turn on him. These vérité extras aren’t there so that the film can ridicule or belittle them; they come off just fine. At the climax, a handful of right-wing would-be militia men are used as the butt of the joke in an elaborate sequence that’s all about foiling terrorists. (It’s also arrested in a “Jackass”/”Beavis and Butt-Head” way.) But it’s too little, too late.
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