Kazakh reporter Borat is summoned back from retirement to travel again to USA in order to give American President Donald Trump a gift, so that Kazakh politicians would be recognized as strongmen by America. However, instead of the planned gift, a monkey, Borat finds his 15-year old daughter Tutar smuggled herself in the package. Borat has Tutar undergo a beauty treatment so that he can give her to Mike Pence as a bride. When that fails, Tutar becomes a feminist and wants to be equal to men, so she becomes a reporter herself. It also turns out Borat was infected by the Covid-19 virus by Kazakh scientists, and thus caused the pandemic in the US.
In “Borat 2”, Sacha Baron Cohen continues with his Poe’s Law-style of comedy inversion, where he ostensibly fully embraces a party, but is in reality holding a giant mirror to Donald Trump’s (Bible Belt) America, just as “Borat” was holding a mirror to George W. Bush’s America where conservatism became an ideology whose extreme bias and apologetics became ridiculous. This mockumentary is a satirical jab at any kind of glorification of backwardness, authoritarianism or regressive inhumanity, whether it is a criticism of profit under any circumstances (the patisserie saleslady who just obediently writes “Jews will not replace us” on an ordered cake), opposition to abortion under any circumstances (even when the woman is pregnant with her own father), professional parasites (an influencer and a “sugar baby”) or just plain spoofing of politicians (Mike Pence is called “the vice pussy-graber”; Rudy Giuliani has a hilarious “Punk’d” interview).
Luckily, this sequel is not as crude nor as a vile as the 1st film, and Maria Bakalova is a nice new partner on Borat’s side, playing Tutar, a backward woman who undergoes a transformation and becomes self-aware and critical of the patriarchy, whereby the movie embraces the power of women this time around. However, Cohen always needed a better “editor”, someone who would point out which of his material is really funny, and which should be deleted due to its misguided humor which contaminates the good impression, and some of these problems are noticeable in the tasteless sequence where Tutar is dancing and lifts her skirt up, revealing her underwear to be drenched in her period. What was the point of that? Assembled as a series of sketches, where it is not always clear which scenes were real and which were staged, “Borat 2” is a social issue essay disguised as a comedy (“I wanted to shoot myself, but could not afford to buy a gun, so I went to the nearest Synagogue!”) worthy of Cohen’s specific humorous taste, the one which culminates in the sequence where he disguises himself as Trump on a conference where Pence is holding a speech: sheer pandemonium breaks loose. However, it would have all worked better if Cohen would use elevated humor to describe the primitivism in society, and not primitive means himself.
Grade:++
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