Borat magnifies the ridiculous and yet allows everyone to root for the ignorant anti-hero who only wants to have a "sexy time"

Rating: 8/10 (11 November 2006)

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they react to this movie. At the surface, Borat is a really funny movie about a Kazakhstani TV personality who goes on a cross-country trip in the "US and A" (as he would like to say) and ends up going on a wild goose chase in search of Pamela Anderson. Get ready for lots of inappropriate, irreverent and shocking, crude behavior! But on another level, the brilliance of Borat is his ability to epitomize the very kind of people he is making a parody of. The movie speaks to everyone because we all have prejudices, just in different degrees of tolerance. As Borat continues to meet all kinds of characters in his trip, the audience learns a lot more about the people Borat meets, and secretly, about themselves if they venture enough to put themselves in the characters' shoes.
Now that sounds like too much work for a cheesy documentary/satire, but that's how the movie appeals to a broad range of people on so many levels. One can take this movie and pass it off as crass, toilet humor, and yet one can also take the humor to be quite high-brow in kitschy packaging. Borat magnifies the ridiculous and yet allows everyone to root for the ignorant anti-hero who only wants to have a "sexy time".