2006
Starring: Sacha Baron Cohen, Ken Davitian, Luenell
Director: Larry Charles
Runtime: 82 Minutes
Distributor: 20th Century Fox
Rating: R

While apparently taking everyone in America unwittingly caught up in this debacle by complete surprise, British residents have been privy to Borat’s goings on for over a decade. Originally a side character on Da Ali G show, in Great Britain, Borat has now made the transition to the big screen and hauled in a staggering quarter of a billion dollars doing it.

Borat, for anyone who still doesn’t know, is a fictional journalist who is purportedly from Kazakhstan. Creator Sacha Baron Cohen uses the character’s guise of a sexist, racist bigot to ambush people and expose their apparent xenophobia and ignorance of foreigners. Whether or not the joke is that they are offended by him or that they are so ignorant of other cultures that they actually believe such a person could genuinely exist is open to debate.

What is not open to debate, at least as far as I’m concerned, is the level that we have sunk to in embracing this man and his ‘comedy’. This film is simply awful, just awful. Borat’s humor gets old FAST. If you find yourself fidgeting and looking at your watch after 8 minutes, you know a film has problems.

Cohen smugly saunters his way through the movie railroading some perfectly reasonable people with his circus clown act with all the subtlety of a piano in the face. Word of mouth has it that it’s supposed to highlight American ignorance of foreign cultures. Well if that is the case, it is very well disguised as almost everyone just seemed like quite normal folk ambushed by a babbling pillock. How can you mock other people for reacting badly towards you when you intentionally set out to try to offend them as much as is possible. We can all laugh at the perceived xenophobia, but are people who claim this film is somehow “poignant” seriously telling us that they would react any differently if some complete and total stranger tried to kiss them on the subway?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Comedy, Feature Films, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.