Borat Subsequent MovieFilm
Ratings: 3/5
Director: Jason Woliner
Producers: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Monica Levinson
Story: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Nina Pedrad, Dan Swimer
Genre: Comedy
Release Date: 23 October 2020
Star Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Maria Bakalova, Dani Popescu, Tom Hanks, Manuel Vieru, Miroslav Tolj, Alin Popa, Ion Gheorghe, Nicolae Gheorghe, Marcela Codrea, Luca Nelu, Mike Pence, Rudolph Giuliani, Judith Dim Evans
Distributed by: Amazon Studio
Plot: This is a sequel that is made as a continuation of the first part. So, if you haven’t watched the first part then you must watch it before you embark to see this movie.
Borat Sagdiyev (played by Sacha Baron Cohen) is a Kazakhstan based journalist who visited great America a long time ago. All this while he has been serving time for Kazakhstan for all the shenanigans, while he was in America. On his return, Borat is blamed for the country's political and financial collapse to support that file footage shows a stockbroker trying to kill himself by jumping from the country's tallest skyscraper, which apparently is a second-floor office in a muddy village.
Now, Borat is given a mission that will redeem and pardon him if it succeeds at it. The center point of the mission is to mend fences between Kazakhstan and the United States. And, in order to do that he has to visit the States with a ‘partner’.
The major difference between the last visit and the current is that everyone now recognises Borat in America. And so, to go about his mission he mostly has to be in disguise. This time, a lot of the pranks are effectively carried out by Tutar (played by Maria Bakalova), who is also his partner.
Tutar is a feral figure, content to be kept like an animal, but with dreams of becoming a conjugal success story in the United States like her heroine, the Slovenian Melania. There is a clever mock-Disney Beauty-and-the-Beast-type animation about Melania that Tutar obsessively watches. Borat transports the daughter around in a horsebox that he tows behind his car, getting advice on how Tutar can be an aspirational young woman.
The idea behind bringing her along is that he will offer her as a sexual gift to a senior government politician – a diplomatic gesture that he hopes will restore his homeland’s alpha male reputation in America’s eyes. The threat of state-approved murder hangs over Borat throughout, thanks to his government's pledge to dismember him should his mission fail.
Given the background story, the father-daughter duo reaches the United States. The hilarious journey of Borat and Tutar sets on a roller coaster of belly paining laughter dose, and some point of reality checks. This is a dark, dark movie, invigorating in its bleakness.
Review:
This story begins with Borat’s first visit to the US, which happened in the impossibly distant, innocent time – 2006 – before social media, before smartphones, before the Iraq war.
As a viewer, the movie touching upon some serious non-talked about issues that are taking place in America. To begin with, let us talks about Q-Anon. The movie touches upon this topic and the message it delivers is quite pointed: the cult's followers who agree with Borat that the Democrats are ‘demons’ and the Clintons are ‘evil’ exploiters.
When we see how Borat's country treats women, horrible belly laughs are sure to follow! Borat is shown trying to position his barely-adolescent daughter as a human bribe in the US. Plus, the scene when at a plastic surgery clinic does not question Borat's bringing in Tutar for Russ Meyer-scale breast implants, even though she is so young that she needs her father's permission; nor are they fazed when he tries to pay with a bag of cash. All these jokes are a subtext, which brings out the exploitation of women and girls, some below the legal age of consent, is an ingrained perk of being a financially comfortable adult man in the United States, as well as in countries that Americans like to paint as inferior.
Also, the pandemic situation is described at a good length with a pinch of laughter added to this gruesome situation. In one of the scenes, Borat performs a song written by his two new buddies at a fair, the audience eagerly sings along with his lyrics about how Covid is ‘The Wuhan Flu’ and the US should chop up journalists ‘like the Saudis do’.
Overall, it is an amusingly hare-brained scheme, but there is nothing in this movie that matches the elegant social experiment of the first part, which sought to explore where precisely American civility departs from morality.
Much of the humour in the film is deliberately provocative/offensive/filthy, and while the script has a theoretically progressive agenda the result risks accusations that the creators are trying to eat their cake and have it, too!
The film concludes on a note of seriousness, telling the public to vote. The first part was much better than the current one, however, it is at least a one-time watch movie!
