not bad but needs an editor

Rating: 7/10 (25 November 2006)

Cohen comes up with some superb scenes here-- the "polite" Southern racists who live on Secession Drive (really!), the wrestling match, and of course the religious scene near the film's end-- but the film is unfocused and often playing for little more than body-humour laughs. Cohen's very thoughtful satire makes the familiar very foreign, but troubling questions remain: skewering people who don't speak English and who have no experience with the uber-irony of Western media (the film's unwitting Romanian village stand-ins for Kazakhstan) lowers the bar hugely, and there is the cardinal offense of attaching a moral to the ending of the film. Fun, but Cohen could certainly do better.