96 min | R | October 23, 2020 | Amazon Studios
Borat returns to America to deliver a bribe and ends up offering his teenage daughter instead. The disguise still works on real people who have no idea they are in a movie. The joke is no longer Borat. The joke is the country.
Borat Sagdiyev comes back to the United States on a mission from Kazakhstan to repair the nation’s disgrace. He brings his daughter Tutar across the country and stages a series of ambushes on real Americans who do not know they are being filmed. The premise is a vehicle. What the film actually documents is the 2020 American political moment and how easily ordinary people accept antisemitism, misogyny, and conspiracy when a foreign clown gives them permission. Sacha Baron Cohen and his nine credited writers build a road movie that doubles as a hidden-camera autopsy of a country mid-breakdown.
Sacha Baron Cohen plays Borat with the same commitment to never breaking character even when the bit collapses around him. The novelty has worn off since the first film, so the script hands the danger to someone new. Maria Bakalova plays Tutar and walks into rooms full of strangers with no script and no safety net. She holds her nerve through a debutante ball, a plastic surgeon’s office, and a one-on-one with a sitting public figure. Bakalova does the hardest work in the film, which is staying in character while real people respond to her in real time.
Jason Woliner directs a film that has to look both staged and stolen, and the seams matter. The hidden-camera footage carries a different grain and instability than the scripted material, and the editing splices the two so the genuine reactions land as punchlines. The cutting protects the marks until the moment it stops protecting them. Woliner and Baron Cohen structure the ambushes so the tension builds toward a single line or gesture that exposes the subject. The sentimental father-daughter arc threaded through the pranks gives the chaos a spine it would otherwise lack.
This is a comedy that knows the first film changed the rules and adjusts accordingly. The shock value is harder to manufacture in a culture that has already absorbed the character. The film compensates by making the real Americans the subject and the prank the method. It lands its hits on the political moment without pretending the formula is as fresh as it once was.