An extended Tom Green Show Skit with very few laughs

Rating: 4/10 (16 July 2009)

I simply don't get BORAT. I didn't find it offensive or shocking, though it did it's damnedest to be both. I also didn't find it very funny. I chuckled occasionally and laughed out loud two or three times, but other than that I found the movie to be boring, repetitive and irritatingly sophomoric.
It seems like I watched a very different movie than all the people who called it "original, edgy, intelligent" or any other such adjective. I found it to be yet another base, uninspired movie the makers of which are under the impression that simply being tasteless and gross is in itself funny. The whole concept was nothing more than an extended Tom Green Show skit, just raunchier and admittedly more outrageous.
The only scene in the entire movie that made me laugh heartily was the scene in which kids run up to Borat's ice cream truck, unaware that there is a bear inside that he has bought as a guard dog. The bear roars at the kids who run away screaming. The scene is funny as hell, and it's a purely slapstick moment with no hint of nastiness. Imagine that? Similarly, the only really funny scenes are the more innocuous jokes such as Borat discovering his partner working as an Oliver Hardy look-alike in Hollywood or the pair mistakenly believing that their hosts at a bed & breakfast have transformed into cockroaches. Other than an undeniably funny nude wrestling match, the more tasteless "jokes" fall flat.
The most interesting thing about BORAT is that most of the people in it were unaware that the movie was a mockumentary, believing "Borat" to be a real person. This leads to many people revealing a very ugly side of themselves (which, along with the prospect of making some money, led to many lawsuits against the filmmakers), such as a coordinator at a rodeo commending Borat's homeland's treatment of homosexuality as an offense punishable by death.
Overall, BORAT is simply not very funny. It's too long, loses steam very early on and then just keeps going. Yeah, it has its moments, but I don't believe Sasha Baron Cohen to be the comic genius that many are calling him. He's funny, he's clever, he's certainly fearless. But he doesn't know when to quit. That's a problem with quite a bit of Hollywood product these days, regardless of genre. Cohen probably thinks one cannot take things too far. I suppose that's subjective, because I definitely think there is such a thing as too much.