stupid isn't always funny

Rating: 3/10 (15 February 2008)

I was hoping for something more from this movie, having seen some of Sacha Baron Cohen's other stuff and having heard lots of good things about the film from friends. There were a couple of funny scenes but overall the movie was boring and predictable. It seems stuck in that sort of Tom Green mentality, stupid + offensive = funny. Cohen's shtick is basically that he's supposed to be from one of the former Soviet Republics, and he likes to see how far he can push "regular" people (most of whom seem to be actors) before they drop politically correct facades and get angry at him. I think the idea is that he is sort of making everyone else ridiculous, and it's true that there's almost no way to retain your "cool" if you were confronted on the street by someone of "Borat's" ilk. But any kind of political or personal revelations in the movie are highly suspect.
It's funny to watch him exhort a rodeo audience to "destroy Iraq, kill all living things" and so forth, but the guy is just so far over the top that it's impossible to believe that anyone really takes him seriously. He needs to play it a bit more straight in my opinion in order for it to be really funny. With the "frat" boys, for example, you could see it as Borat conning them all into revealing some of the casual ugliness of their lifestyles. That is, you could see it that way if you were really naive and you didn't think that Borat's act is so outrageous that the guys in the movie were just sort of playing along with the general craziness.
In my opinion it's not really worth seeing.