Can Sacha Baron Cohen, in his most famous character from two decades ago, still be relevant in Nathan Fielder's era? I was skeptical, and the new movie Ali G: Who Iz I? proves me right. Da Ali G Show, in the early-2000s, had a simple conceit: Sacha Baron Cohen played three different characters, a “hip hop journalist,” Ali G; a Kazakh reporter, Borat; and a gay Austrian fashionista, Bruno. He’d interview people in character, often famous politicians and other public figures, and see how they reacted.
Originally huge in his native Britain, Baron Cohen successfully migrated stateside, where Da Ali G Show fit into the post-9/11 era during its HBO run. All three characters have been adapted into movies, bringing them into real-life situations, with 2006’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan as the only true masterpiece.
While Baron Cohen made a decent Borat sequel in 2020, which included Rudy Giuliani doing some embarrassing stuff on camera, his career has mostly been in the eclipse in recent years, as he’s starred in mediocre streaming comedies like Ladies First. Also, a lot of people seem to have decided his old characters, by modern standards, were racist. I don’t buy that.
Baron Cohen has now returned to the Ali G character with Ali G: Who Iz I?, a movie he directed and co-wrote with five others. After a single weekend in theaters, the movie landed on Prime Video this week. My objection to the return of Ali G isn’t that the character is racist, or that Baron Cohen is a “Zionist,” the type of assertion that’s become a separate branch of film criticism.
The conceit this time is that Ali G really did become the famous host of Da Ali G Show, but was a real guy, and not a fictional character played by Sacha Baron Cohen. Today, he’s down and out and long past his prime, but the film finds it hilarious to introduce Ali G to concepts like OnlyFans, Mukbang, and “gaslighting.”
The character receives a fax letting him know he’s been offered a return to HBO for a new season. But as the fax medium suggests, the offer is from more than 20 years ago and is no longer good—after all, HBO is in its fourth ownership regime since Da Ali G Show last aired—so he takes his show to TikTok.
The antagonist, also played by Baron Cohen, is “Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello,” the ponytailed gender-studies professor the actor played in Who Is America?, the Showtime show he created that ran for just seven episodes in 2018. Cain-N’Degeocello was an awful character, and he's not funny here either, in a bit where he tries to get Ali G “canceled” by proving he’s not really Black.
A warning to the Sacha-is-a-Zionist brigade: The film also brings back Col. Erran Morad, the Israeli Mossad character, also from Who Is America?, who revives his bit in which he gets American conservatives to fetishize wanton violence. But why is he on the same side as the left-wing gender studies professor and the militia guys?
The film isn’t funny. The plot idea isn’t good, and the execution isn’t better. The plot, which is mostly about cultural appropriation and cancel culture, is about five years out of date. The film’s structure doesn’t let Ali G do what he does best: interview politicians and other notables who don’t recognize him. Of Baron Cohen’s characters, Ali G has been the one whose schtick translates the worst to the real world and non-interview scenarios, and most of the new movie is just that.