Kazakh who?

Rating: 6/10 (10 January 2007)

We must begin by saying that this movie's director was surely never in Kazakhstan nor has he ever seen a Kazakh in his life. The character impersonated by Sacha Baron Cohen shows only the stereotype that Americans imagine when they think about Mediterranean popular characters, from his physical appearance to his way of talking and behaviour. This movie is only a succession of gags of which a few are funny indeed but whose majority is not funny at all and sometimes even disgusting. The story of the Kazakh journalist who went to USA to learn about American way of life is poor indeed. The best parts of the movie are those episodes where some idiosyncrasies of American society are shown like for instance a religious meeting near the end of the movie and the behaviour of white and black young people. But even those are almost only commonplaces we have seen much better treated in lots of other movies. This movie is a real disillusion.