Before he gave us the antisemitic news reporter and the flamboyant hairdresser, Sacha Baron Cohen created another character—a white rapper named Ali G, who believed he was part Black and was, at least as far as we can tell here, all idiot. The character is monumentally stupid, which is really the only joke in Ali G: Who Iz I?, a feature-length sequel to both “Da Ali G Show” and another movie tie-in from 2002. For the uninitiated, it was easy to see why Borat Sagdiyev and Brüno Gehard appealed to fans of shocking humor, because their shock value was at the service of something else, but times, as well as what passes for successfully funny shock-value humor during these times we live in, change.
It might have been funny at one point somewhere in the past to see Baron Cohen, in character as one of a handful he essays here, provoke a conference room full of Black activists by asking them to support the brutal political assassination of Ali G and, in the process, evoking a whole barrage of racist and racialist humor (including the ‘n’ word) to do so. Why that might have been funny at some point is a question whose answer lay, once again, in the subjective and the existential. As he delivers it here, with a final appeal that falls flat on its face, it just comes across as desperate.
Baron Cohen, by the way, is also making his directorial debut with the movie, which he co-wrote with the usually countless number of fellow creatives receiving both screenplay and story credits. It all, predictably, has the feel of being made up on the spot, to an even greater extent than usual. The comedian and actor does sort of have a few political points to make, but they’re at the service of a general desire to shock than to say anything with salience or clarity.
The basics of the threadbare plot have Ali coming to realize that, two decades after the cancellation of his show, he’s about to be a father to his longtime girlfriend Julie’s (Morgana Robinson) child and will need some type of financial cushion after squandering his wealth. The plan is to get back into the good books of the public (and maybe that television studio, which becomes involved in a way that only corporate entities with a healthy sense of humor would possibly agree to) with a revived version of the show in an America whose political landscape has changed drastically and, perhaps, irrevocably. Another character created by Baron Cohen might have made a go of pulling off some miraculously staged performance-art exhibitions in the service of this scenario.
Indeed, we do still marvel at the idea that any part of the movie’s making was either possible or even legal, as Baron Cohen, in character as Ali, dupes politicians and public figures into unlikely scenarios for the purpose of making a mockery of them (they all belong to a particular political persuasion, of course, but that’s old news in Baron Cohen land). A graphic live birth, attended by a couple of these unwitting victims, is probably the height of how-did-they-do-that trickery, although there’s not really a joke in the scene beyond the staging of it. A gamble in which some others learn to ward off threats by way of a projectile-launching mechanism attached to the rear-end and loaded with an appendage attached to the front (use your imagination) is probably closer, but then again, that’s sort of an extension upon a pre-existing idea from another of Baron Cohen’s comedy-exploitation shows and only just barely an extension.
The rest of the plot has Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello (also Baron Cohen) returning the vow vengeance against his old nemesis by cancelling him in the public square by any means necessary (including by hiring an “unpaid African intern,” played by Alpha Miknas, to do his bidding). It’s not much of a plot, obviously, but it does incite a few things for Ali to figure out in his personal life. What it doesn’t do is ward off the feeling that all this was just a reason for Baron Cohen to bring back the character for nostalgia purposes.
Some of this—like an attempt to buy a luxury home from a real estate agent who goes through some surprising motions to do his job, occasionally in the presence of a defecating Ali—is admittedly amusing, and some of it—like an artificially generated video, designed to save face for Ali with the Christian community, that barrels far beyond the boundaries of taste by featuring the likenesses of everyone from Jesus to Hitler to a pair of murdered hip-hop artists—is simply inexplicable. For the most part, Ali G: Who Iz I? just comes across as desperate and weirdly shapeless.
Rating: *½ (out of ****)
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