Brightly Orchestrated, Hilarious Anarchy with a Sharp Edge

Rating: 8/10 (5 March 2012)

Guerilla improv often has a very short shelf life, but this one's still funny even after you know where it's going. In Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen has a character that's perfect for dragging hilarious material out of his unsuspecting subjects: naive and disarming on the surface, vulgar and profane beneath. He gets some really ripe stuff from the act this time around, with the lowlights of his American tour including a homophobic cowboy, a troupe of bigoted etiquette experts and an RV full of misogynist frat boys. The short, storyline-advancing scenes in between each unscripted segment are generally thin and bland, but Cohen's ad-libbed torments of the unprepared masses are clearly the movie's meat and potatoes and it wisely never strays far from that core.