Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (which will hereby be referred to as Borat 2 for the sake of our poor word count) simply shouldn’t exist. Given the reliance on duping unsuspecting members of the public in the first Borat film, that Sacha Baron Cohen was able to pull it off again in a world where the character is almost as recognisable as Mickey Mouse and the McDonald’s arches is nothing short of miraculous.
The film gets creative, choosing to disguise Borat and let the new character of Tutar, his daughter, do some of the heavy lifting alongside plenty of sequences involving people who were seemingly living under rocks in 2006.
Is it as good as the first movie, which essentially created the cinema unawarité genre? No. Of course it isn’t. Just how fresh and innovative that film was aside, it was also the product of hundreds of hours of footage being whittled down to 90 of the funniest minutes ever put on film. Not just due to the character’s notoriety, but also the coronavirus pandemic striking in the middle of production, Borat 2 clearly didn’t have the luxury to film as much or as freely as its predecessor and the result is a film that largely feels content to simply just manage to be a Borat sequel, rather than topping what came before it.
That said, Borat 2 still manages to be not only one of the funniest films in years, but also an admirable attempt to satirise a world gone mad. It’s just about the best Borat sequel that we could have hoped for – and that’s in a world where it existing at all is an admirable feat.
