Plainly repulsive

Rating: 3/10 (16 July 2007)

To my understanding, the merits of Borat are supposed to be two-fold: 1) despite his outlandish personality, the character Borat is based on a real, existing person, and 2) Borat's racism and sexism is supposed to reveal parallel attitudes in USA.
The movie Borat fails on both counts. I don't care if Borat was inspired by an actual person, or if Sacha Baron Cohen is, despite Borat's oft-voiced Antisemitism, Jewish. I am saying this because Baron Cohen has fabricated an entire Kazakh national identity similar to the repulsive character, and it isn't funny, because the way Kazakhs are shown is not true to life. You're not given a chance to look at these people and say, 'It's funny, because that's how it really is there,' because it simply is not a truthful picture of any Eastern European folks. The filmmakers merely rely on the outrageousness of the situations. Moreover, it enforces existing small-minded attitudes towards foreign peoples and it's really a shame.
As said, this disgusting protagonist, what the filmmakers seem to see as the stereotypical Eastern European guy is supposed to be in unison with the underlying attitudes of Americans. Problem is, only a few racist or sexist Americans are to be found in the movie. Most Americans seen are more than willing to accept Borat and his sidekick, and want to show what hospitable folks Americans really are, but the filmmakers exploit this trust to reach their own, suspicious goals.
Here comes another worrying element in the film. First of all, to be honest, whenever I am watching a hidden camera show (which Borat essentially is most of the time, as the non-actors appearing in the movie were tricked to do so) in the vein of Candid Camera, I find myself wondering what it would be like if they would not limit themselves to harmless little pranks, but put their victims into an extremely uncomfortable situation. Well, the filmmakers of Borat truly have freed themselves from such silly restrains. The victims of Borat are bullied to boiling point, which takes varying amounts of time, but what becomes clear is that wherever Borat goes, he is supposed to cause havoc. The further you watch the movie and the more you read the interviews with its creators, it becomes obvious that they wear every called police patrol, every forceful tackle by security like a badge of honour.
It seems to be impossible for Baron Cohen to use the premise of the film to extract subtle, poignant humour from situations in which the cultures collide. Instead, Baron Cohen and his company have reduced themselves to mere a**holes and aim for the lowest common denominator, complete with the tiring scenes in which the filmmakers assume that the naked body of an ugly man is supremely hilarious, especially if it is wrestling with another ugly man.