Classic Movie Review: 'Borat' is Still Overrated

There is and has long been, a culture of cool around Sasha Baron Cohen. People just want to be in on Sasha Baron Cohen's joke and explain to everyone how they are in on the joke while so many others aren't. Count me as someone who is not entirely in on the joke. Cohen’s pseudo-documentary - hidden camera prank show- Borat, about a reporter from a backwoods former Russian republic, who traveled to America to learn our culture is funny, often riotously so. But was Borat really a zeitgeist grabbing bit of innovative comedy or was it just Jackass caught in the culture of cool?

It is the search for something beyond the laughs in Borat that I find puzzling. Is the film satirical? Yes. Does Borat expose the hypocrisy of everyday Americans? Sure. Does it have a point or purpose in doing so? Not really, beyond making others laugh at the sad state of some of their fellow citizens, Borat is rather needless. If you didn’t know that uptight southerners and drunken fratboys were often out of touch with the mainstream or clinging to less than forward thinking values, perhaps you need to engage with the world more yourself rather than have Sasha Baron Cohen show you ugly examples.

There is just not much 'there' there in Borat. It’s funny but stylistically is Borat anymore transgressive than the Jackass movies or even something as timid as late TV Show Punkd? Borat, despite what so many in the culture war claim, is no groundbreaking, earth shattering, expose on our culture. The film is not so astonishingly humorous and insightful that it deserved an Oscar nomination. Borat is just a funny movie with a clever performance by an at the time rising star comedian willing to engage with enough bathroom humor to satisfy the indiscriminate crowd.

For those just joining us and not familiar, Borat Sagdiev (Cohen) is a TV personality in the tiny nation of Kazakstan where the top exports are prostitutes and anti-Semitism. Borat has been tasked by the Kazak government to investigate American culture and bring some of it back to Kazakhstan. With his giant bear of a producer, Azamat (Ken Davitan), Borat makes his way to America and finds himself in the midst of a giant, bustling society that is both fascinating and terribly confusing.

In America; Borat finds that women are allowed to drive cars and can have sex with whomever they want but cannot be forced to have sex with him. Borat will spend the next week interviewing Americans from various walks of life. He will travel across the country and visit with frat boys and rodeo cowboys and gentile southerners and his earnest, faux innocence will, from time to time, cause these everyday Americans to reveal things about themselves they otherwise might not.

Along the way Borat becomes fascinated with Pamela Anderson and will attempt to capture her for a traditional Kazak wedding. Let's just say Pam is less than enthused with this idea. That is a semblance of a plot in Borat. The film is shot in a documentary style that is similar, if slightly more polished, to the style it was shot for Sasha Baron Cohen's TV series, Da Ali G Show, where the character of Borat was born. On TV, Borat was filler material for Cohen's funnier and even more smartly satirical Ali G. Borat in small doses on the show was often quite funny. Stretched to feature length the one note joke wears a little thin.

Part Tom Green, part Jackass and just a hint of Punk'd, Borat is not the most original comedy to come down the pike. Naked fat guy wrestling and crapping in public, Jackass did it first. Ambushing strangers on the streets of New York? Tom Green did it on his TV show. Borat's centerpiece, interviews with everyday Americans in which they believe he really is this naïve, foreign, bigot/sexist/homophobe, are funny but again, not original. Cohen himself did this same bit even funnier in the guise of his Ali G character on HBO.

The interview scenes in Borat are the films funniest moments and Cohen's ability to adapt and push the boundaries of these scenes is remarkably brave. I have an issue with some of the poor folks who simply made the mistake of offering Cohen kindness, Cohen's act comes off as bullying at times. But, the southern couple who invited Borat to dinner at their home because they have a backwoods fascination with meeting a foreigner that is fairly mocked and as Cohen pushes the scene further and further, the laughs are quite big.

Unfortunately this is the only scene in the film that really keeps up sustained laughs. Borat has far too much downtime where Cohen searches for the next opportunity for a joke. Borat's fascination with Pamela Anderson is an example of a gag that goes on and on and just doesn't work. Is the joke that his choice of crushes is not exactly timely? By 2006, Pamela Anderson wasn’t nearly the sex god she was during her Baywatch and sex tape fueled height. Or, was Anderson just the first attractive, well-known, actress to agree to appear in the film? The staged payoff of this running gag is the film's absolute low point.

Sasha Baron Cohen's commitment to this character is, admittedly, extraordinary. But, I can't help but wonder just how much footage Cohen and director Larry Charles, of Seinfeld fame, left laying on the cutting room floor back in 2006. I'm betting it was a sizable amount. As much time as Borat spends in the movie searching for the joke, pushing and prodding his subjects to get them to crack, there must be hours of work that never panned out.

If you love bathroom humor, Borat is most definitely the movie for you. While it doesn't push the boundaries of disgust as far as the Jackass crew does, Borat's bringing a bag of his feces to the hostess of a dinner party, as a gift offering, is something that I'm sure made Johnny Knoxville fans smile. Borat crapping in some bushes on the streets of New York is basically a knockoff of a scene in the Jackass movie where Knoxville uses a model toilet in a hardware store.

Maybe the one scene in all of Borat that lives up to the hype of Cohen's culture of cool, is one in which our hero is invited to sing the Kazak national anthem at a rodeo in Texas. That Cohen uses the opportunity to find homophobia amongst this crowd seems an easy target. However, when Borat exclaims that Kazakhstan supports 'premier' Bush's war on terror the scene becomes tensely funny. It’s one of the few scenes in Borat that carries some of the charge and tension that so many in the culture of cool claimed the movie has all throughout its runtime.

Fair to say, I'm not nearly as impressed with Borat as so many others were back in 2006. Borat is funny and outlandish and politically incorrect but it's not the groundbreaking, world changing, incredible satire that so many critics and fans tripped over themselves to praise over the last 14 years. Jackass, Tom Green and Punk'd have pulled off moments of equal disgust and humor and Borat lifts heavily from each of those sources. He's also not as even as brilliantly satirical as Cohen's own creation, Da Ali G show which did a far better job of lampooning hypocrisy and pomposity than anything in Borat.

Borat is also quite often meandering and repetitive. The jokes are there, Cohen is funny and he has a strong nose for hypocrisy. I am perhaps just not all that keen bathroom humor as the height of transgression. Being gross is too often Cohen’s go to when he appears unable to truly offend people or catch them in a bit of their own hypocritical, politically incorrect, web. At times, Cohen’s superiority complex shines through and it becomes a classic case of punching down when you should be punching up.

The Borat sequel, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, or Borat 2, arrives on Amazon Prime on October 23rd.