If you liked Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G the first time around, you’ll like this less; if you disliked it, you’ll dislike this more; if you suspected it was racist, you’ll be more emboldened to say so – especially as Baron Cohen has dreamed up a whole new character apparently to pre-empt and mock precisely that objection. Broad and crass as it often is – in fact always is – this Ali G sequel is sometimes funny: the athletic vigour of our hero’s pranking and punking is like the umpteenth Jackass film at which you might find yourself laughing, and Baron Cohen blunders with the semi-intentional force of an XL bully into the issue of whether jokes are still allowed. Unlike the first film, Ali G in Da House from 2002, this is not a full written-through narrative.
It is basically another live-ammo series of hoaxes with some spectacular bad taste perpetrated upon the deserving and less deserving; it satirises the shamelessness of anti-woke free speech martyrs, punching up and down with grossout cringe, and the targets include some big names who shouldn’t be revealed here. There are two other subordinate characters: Erran Morad, a sinister Mossad/IDF officer turned US security consultant (who appeared in Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? TV series), and a new figure: Dr Nira Cain-N’Degrocello, a grotesquely supercilious white liberal who is the self-appointed scourge of cultural appropriation.
The dupes are built into a big silly climax fabricated with body doubles and (presumably) covert reshooting. The insurmountable problem is that the film keeps having to tell you who is and isn’t “in on it”: at the beginning, over the closing credits at the end and even briefly in the middle of the action. Well, Ali G was from so very long ago, and even the high-water mark of Baron Cohen’s Borat popularity was quite long ago, and the online media scene now so fragmented that … yes … people have forgotten, a whole new generation doesn’t know.
People really don’t recognise him. The high concept is that Ali is now washed up, short of money and unpopular, and old-school media figure that he is, he disapproves of a plan by his heavily pregnant partner Julie (Morgana Robinson) to launch an OnlyFans account. But on trying to sell his fax machine in a Staines high street pawn shop, an old fax chunters out of it with an offer from HBO for a new show.
Overexcited, Ali and Julie head off to the US to sucker some people in the traditional style; the smallscreen setup blown up to high-def cinematic proportions. His fictional woke tormentor decides to take him down and, by employing the Israeli hardman, tries to convince credulous and aggressive Republicans that Ali is a Mexican terrorist whose baby must be prevented at all costs from being born on US soil. The movie does make a few people look silly, yes, although Baron Cohen doesn’t land a huge punch on a big name the way he did in the Borat sequel.
So who iz Ali G and what iz the point of trundling him out again? The first film implied he was once a Robert Smith-type goth, but that is now forgotten about. Interestingly, one person who this film doesn’t allude to is Tim Westwood, the BBC Radio 1 hip-hop DJ and son of the Bishop of Peterborough whose speech mannerisms were held to be one influence on Baron Cohen’s great creation, and proof positive that white people did indeed patronisingly ape a street way of speaking.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
