The Borat Sequel Continues Sacha Baron Cohen’s Unfortunate Preference For Punching Down

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Comedy fans and politicos alike were both anticipating Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat sequel on Thursday when it was announced that it would drop during the final 2020 presidential debate.

Anticipation had never been higher thanks to a highly-publicized scene of President Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani being caught in a hotel room encounter with Borat’s daughter, but unfortunately, like Giuliani’s scene, the rest of the movie was also underwhelming.

A barebones plot in typical Cohen fashion — with the real draw of the movie being the reactions from the public to Cohen’s pranks — Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is about an over-the-top character who goes on a trip to America with a companion.

As the film progresses, Borat — the main character who is on a mission — falls out with the companion, causing the two to split temporarily, before reuniting for a happy, feel-good ending.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same plot we saw in the first Borat. And Bruno. And The Dictator.

But in many ways, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was probably what a lot of people were expecting: nostalgic Borat — only greyer, more wrinkly, more tired — with the sort of Trump jokes that’ll whip an older, middle-class white woman into hysterics and a few My Wife!‘s for good measure.

There were some genuine laughs to be had, but few of them were a result of Cohen himself.

The loudest I laughed was when — at a father and daughter ball in Georgia — a girl screamed into the face of her dad for joking with Borat about how much his fictional daughter would cost.

After attempting several times to pull her father away from Borat’s incendiary conversation, she finally snaps and declares — inches from his face, in the most seething manner — about how “fucking disgusting” he is for going along with it.

Few of Cohen’s own jokes and pranks stick, however, with the comedian opting to punch down for the majority of the movie.

Borat’s interactions with Giuliani and Vice President Mike Pence were the two most publicized scenes before the movie came out, but they’re few and far between, likely due to the fact that most in the higher echelons of society now know better than to fall for one of Cohen’s ruses.

Instead, Cohen spends a good chunk of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm pranking some of the most normal, good-natured folks you’ll ever see on a screen. Two men invite Borat to stay at their home, despite the pandemic, after he claims he has nowhere else to stay. Cohen responds by making them look like a couple of stupid, Trump-supporting rednecks.

An African-American babysitter tries repeatedly and desperately to help Borat’s daughter, who keeps throwing up red flags about her fictional abusive father, who is trying to give her away as a gift, and Cohen responds in kind by asking the woman — mockingly, in his silly voice — whether she wants to be his “new Black wife” before running away. It’s the final interaction between the two in the movie.

Even a Holocaust survivor — who died before the movie’s release — became an unwitting participant in one of Borat’s pranks after he entered a synagogue dressed as a Nazi-esque caricature of a Jew and begged her not to eat him.

The woman was reportedly the only person Cohen broke character to at the end, but a kind moment where she embraces him, gets him food, and sits down to talk with him about why he’s so afraid of the Jews still ends up being turned into a cheap prank, reminiscent of the wave of YouTube “social experiments” a few years ago.

Sure it could be argued that these people were only the victims of a bit of lighthearted comedy at worst, and didn’t face Cohen’s wrath quite in the same way as a powerful figure like Giuliani, but they still end up being part of the joke. A joke that is only funny due to their unwitting participation.

And despite Cohen dedicating the movie to the Jewish woman from the synagogue who has since died, it’s crystal clear what her daughter thinks of the comedian. She’s suing him.

Cohen — who entered the list of Britain’s richest people in 2016 with a net worth of over $100 million — claims that his own characters and their absurd prejudices are the real joke in his movies. But that doesn’t explain why they all seem to rely on punching down and tricking members of the public who have never been and will never be, wealthy public figures.

In the first Borat movie, Cohen made headlines for tricking and ridiculing a small, poor village in Romania. The sequel continues this same unfortunate theme.