Worthy sequel "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm" summarizes dumpster year and steamrolls political correctness

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2020)

“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” is a very nice follow-up to a culture-clash pseudo-documentary that wasn’t just “Jackass”-style leftovers and captured lightning in a bottle. Since 2006’s riotously hilarious, provocative and satirically razor-sharp “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” the world has changed and yet it’s actually caught up to the regressive level of the cluelessly bigoted, still-unenlightened Borat Sagdiyev (Sacha Baron Cohen). With the current state of the world and this dumpster fire of a year, it’s still very worthy of skewering and up-to-the-minute with even the COVID-19 quarantine and social distancing on the table for its social-satire targets. As director Jason Woliner adopts director Larry Charles’ gonzo, guerilla-style filmmaking from the first film, “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” is just as shockingly crude, if not more. The title even keeps changing, rivaling the over-length of Borat’s first cinematic introduction to the world. For a sequel, it even makes a rare case for the notion that the longer the screenplay credits are, the better the movie. 

Fourteen years ago, journalist Borat Sagdiyev’s moviefilm was a great success. Once his politically backwards Third World country of Kazakhstan became a laughingstock and he became blamed for the country’s failure, he was sentenced for life to hard labor in Gulag. To redeem himself, Borat is tasked with a so-called simple mission by the Kazakh premier. En route to the U.S.A., he must deliver a gift—Johnny the Monkey, Kazakhstan’s Minister of Culture and number one porno star—to earn the trust of Donald “McDonald” Trump. When the crate holding the superstar monkey is opened in the states, he instead finds a stowaway: his 15-year-old daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova), the oldest unmarried woman in Kazakhstan. All she wants to do is live in a golden cage like her favorite princess, Melania Trump, but to save himself from execution, Borat decides to give his daughter as a gift to Trump’s right-hand man, Michael Pence. Will anything go as planned?

The screenplay by Sacha Baron Cohen & Anthony Hines & Dan Swimer & Peter Baynham & Eric Rivinoja & Dan Mazer & Jena Friedman & Lee Kern immediately debunks the idea that a “Borat” sequel wouldn’t work. How could Cohen remain in character or pull off the allegedly unstaged pranks if everyone knows and recognizes Borat Sagdiyev on the street? It smartly acknowledges this fact early on, Borat accepting himself as a celebrity, “or maybe it was gray suit.” Cohen, once again, goes for it. How far he will go for a bit holds no boundaries, and Cohen has found a new companion to commit outrageous, confrontational stunts alongside him. Game and crass for all of the shock humor and pranks but nevertheless sweet as Tutar, Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova is the breakout star here and a gift to 2020. Even as an actual character, Tutar comes into her own and learns she can do anything. Come for Borat, but stay for Tutar.

All of Borat and Tutar’s shenanigans are as laugh-out-loud hilarious as they are effectively cringe-inducing and scathing, exposing the racism, sexism, and overall intolerance that still exists in America. A blonde, busty sugar baby teaches Tutar how to be submissive. Father and daughter get a bakery owner to write an anti-Semitic message on a chocolate cake. Tutar also ends up convincing her daddy to buy her a treat, a cupcake with a tiny plastic baby on top; when she swallows the baby, they go to a women’s health clinic to get the “baby” out of her, and you know where this is going. They attend a debutante ball, where Borat and Tutar end up performing a “moon blood fertility dance,” and it’s such a horrifyingly wrong gross-out spectacle that it’ll be hard to look away. The duo then slips into an annual Conservative Political Action Conference without being noticed in disguise as first a KKK member and then our Commander in Chief. When delivering Tutar to Pence is a bust, his last-ditch effort is to deliver Tutar as a sexy gift to New York mayor Rudy Giuliani; she poses as a right-wing journalist interviewing Giuliani in his hotel room before he invites her into the bedroom, so he can tuck in his shirt on the bed (not!). It’s a gamble of a punk—and a gross, damning look for the compromised mayor—that pays off scandalously. Finally, during a “hoax virus lockdown,” Borat is taken in by two country bumpkins, “two of America’s greatest scientists,” who give conspiracy theories about Hilary Clinton drinking the blood of children. 

Rather than checking social media, “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” (scroll to the top for the full title) is a cuttingly funny and not-so-fond snapshot of our troubling political climate. There are welcome glimmers of compassion, though, in corners of the film’s vision of America. A sequence at a Jewish synagogue is affecting, in which Borat, ignorantly dressed as a stereotypical Jewish man, meets the heroically decent (and now-late) Judith Dim Evans, who teaches him that the Holocaust did, in fact, happen. Rightfully, the film is dedicated to Judith. Another voice of reason is a babysitter (Jeanise Jones), who’s asked by Tutar to read to her the true “vagina dentata” story of Nadia Akatov; Jeanise realizes just how much propaganda Tutar has been fed by her father her whole life. Furthermore, when Tutar stumbles upon the Hillsborough Republican Women’s Club Meeting at a Hampton Inn, she learns that everything Daddy told her from a medieval manual—women cannot drive cars and women have teeth downstairs—is a lie. Like its fourteen-year-old predecessor, this satirical comedy will appall and offend, bulldozing through guardrails protecting political correctness and good taste to get a rise out of anyone and everyone. With that said, Borat and Tutar’s sequel “moviefilm” might just be the release America needs right now in an unfunny year. Very good success!

Grade: B +

Amazon Studios released “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” (96 min.) for streaming on October 23, 2020.