Borat! Funny and alarming!

Rating: 9/10 (3 November 2006)

Jagshemash! Here a come film review to you! OK, OK, let us leave the comedy mimicking of a central-Asian nitwit to the man who does it best: Sacha Baron Cohen. In his second feature outing following the regrettable 'Ali G Indahouse', Baron Cohen brings another of his comic creations to the screen in Borat, a riotously funny mixture of bigotry, buffoonery and bad taste.
Where Ali G failed back 2002 by taking the Staines legend out of his usual chat show set-up and surrounded him with fictional characters, Borat succeeds by retaining the formula that made the show so ridiculously hilarious: making real people look silly. What little plot the movie has (Borat sent to the 'US and A' to learn cultural lessons for Kazakhstan government) is made up for by the sheer amount of gut-busting laughs. As Borat, a naive journalist with tremendously backward views on matters of sex, religion and race, makes his way across the US, his confrontations with the American public, be they real or staged, cannot help but entertain.
We get anti-semitic jokes, naked man wrestling, a bear in an ice cream van and so much more it would be rude to spoil your fun. Some conservatives have decried the film as offensive and crude but Baron Cohen is doing something more than mere gross-out humor; revealing that racial bigotry and deep-rooted sexist beliefs can still be found not only in Borat's fictional 'Kazakhstan' but in the very real, United States of America.