Overrated

Rating: 6/10 (24 November 2006)

I liked the small clips of Borat I saw on Ali G, so I really was looking forward to seeing this film. However, after watching it, some of the gags worked, while others were plain terrible.
Let me preface the following by saying I'm not adverse to offensive humor...hey, I love South Park. However, while South Park uses its humor to convey a (almost always) great message, "Borat" is filled with scatological humor that gets tiring after 40 minutes with nowhere to go. No doubt, the "wrestling scene" was hilarious, but with its multiple allusions to sex and body excrement, I got tired of it after a while. I think if half the sex/BE jokes were left out, and Borat was more "gullible" than his horny self and an uninitiated stranger to the American ways in a more realistic way (e.g. not presenting feces at a dinner table), this would have been a classic. But as some folks that I saw it with said..."in the end, the Americans won, because it showed them to be on the whole much kinder than the mind behind Borat". While it may be a satire on people, it did not do so convincingly, and in the end, I think I could have waited for it on DVD.
6/10.