Borat (the film and the character) reaches for a star and comes up short.

Rating: 5/10 (6 May 2007)

Sasha Baren Cohen is making a career out of humor which makes most intelligent and sensitive people somewhat uncomfortable. This is not necessarily a bad thing if the humor has a good purpose. However, the whole business has achieved, with this movie, the status of an inside-joke. If you haven't seen the Ali G show, you won't get some of this film, and it may come off simply as a painful and offensive exploitation film (which it is, to an extent). The commercial success of Borat is best explained by the market sector it appealed to - fans of Sasha Cohen and the crowd who appreciates the new wave of dumbed-down low-brow humor. Put together, that's a pretty big market.
The recent trend of dumbed-down comedy (Anything starring Will Farrell, etc) is only slightly improved by Borat. The film is cleverly plotted and exploits every opportunity to poke fun at stereotypes (both American and Eastern European), but, unlike many successful attacks on stereotypes, Borat does not offer any solution nor a clear statement against them. Instead, the abject stupidity of the lead character (which is vaguely disguised as cross-cultural confusion) is used as an excuse to create a variety of absurd situations which, though sometimes amusing, are so firmly anchored in stereotypes themselves that the film's critique of stereotypes ends up doing the exact same thing as the lead character - trying very hard to do something good, but doing the exact opposite instead.
Borat (Sasha Cohen) is a native of Kazakhstan (which is a real place - 9th largest country in the world - landlocked and nestled between Asia and Europe). He comes to America with a morbidly obese TV producer to create an ethnographic documentary for native county. The geography of Kazakhstan appears to be the excuse for incorporating many stereotypes about eastern Europeans and Middle-easterners. But the film has absolutely nothing to do with Kazakhstan - which is, in fact, one of the most economically self-sufficient, politically sophisticated and progressive of the former soviet republics, and has a long and interesting cultural history completely unrelated to ANYTHING shown in this film. So much for that grain of truth.
Borat makes a series of amusing errors as he travels across the USA encountering every major American stereotype along the way. Borat and his producer are completely unprepared for most of what they find in America. They do not understand what toilets are, think they can rape any woman they see, and believe that Jewish people are shape-shifting, murderous thieving monsters. Borat believes that Pamela Anderson will marry him when he reaches California. I think you can see where this is headed. As many have stated before me, the film really is like a series of strung-together Jackass skits. To this simple formula, however, is added a pseudo-ethnographic component - making it just a little more edgy than the juvenile antics of the Jackass team.
It's hard for me to write a bottom line recommendation for this film. The film does have some genuinely funny moments, and does sometimes make its audience think positively about cultural difference. But it's inconsistent in terms of humor, philosophy and a great deal more.
If you like Cohen, you'll love it. If you liked Anchorman and Talladega Nights you might like it. If you enjoy Jackass, you might like it.
Anthropologists, Sociologists, historians, people who did not vote for George Bush, middle easterners and eastern Europeans will probably want to avoid this film. Also, those easily offended by purely comedic antisemitism, stereotypes about the people of the American south, homophobia and racism, should avoid this.