Ali G: Who Iz I?

Whether he’s mixing up Buzz Aldrin and Buzz Lightyear or WMDs and BLTs, Ali G has always been at his best when he’s been utterly ignorant but fantastically front-footed. So America’s endless cultural wars seem like the perfect place to parachute in Sacha Baron Cohen’s ’90s TV character. He is among friends.

Written and directed by Baron Cohen, the results of this second Ali G movie are as scattergun as you might expect from Staines’s thinly sketched white-boy wannabe rapper. They’re also occasionally properly funny and often choke-on-your-popcorn disgusting. There are gross-out stunts here the Jackass crew would turn their noses up at.

That Ali G is now in his fifties and still wearing the same wraparound shades and NBA gear oddly works in the film’s favour. The character has always been a deliberate pastiche of rap wannabes and now that he’s middle-aged too, his delusions are even sillier. With long-term girlfriend Julie (now played by Morgana Robinson), he’s struggling in the job market and running from his responsibilities as a dad-to-be. So when an old fax machine spits out a lucrative HBO contract offer for a third season of his TV show, he’s off to LA to seal a deal that’s very obviously two decades out of date.

So, yes, Ali G: Who Iz I? is set in a world in which Alistair, as Julie endearingly calls him, has had an HBO run successful enough to warrant a second season. And one where he still thinks he’s Black after five decades on Earth. The plot, such as it is, is driven by his misguided belief that his dad is A$AP Rocky (the rapper makes a sporting cameo), which in turn draws him into the ugliest fringes of white nationalist culture.

One of the politicians involved is already planning to sue Baron Cohen

Instead of the Ali G Indahouse approach of inserting the character into something resembling a three-act structure, Baron Cohen reverts to the punking Borat tactic of finding extremist Americans willing to go to outlandish lengths to prove how racist, stupid and violent they are – and, as usual, finds loads of willing volunteers. Some of them are mainstream politicians, which lends a vague sense of topicality. One is already planning to sue him.

Sacha Baron Cohen proves an equal opportunities satirist here, lacquering on the prosthetics to play two new characters: a progressive professor willing to kill for his DEI agenda and an ex-Mossad agent training white supremacists to use a penis-pump-operated gun to take down ‘illegals’. ‘I’ve been in 14 terror attacks,’ he tells them, ‘and started two’.

Unexpectedly, the film opens with a Voltaire quote – ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’ – and ends with a reminder that almost everyone in the film was ‘not in on the joke’. The point is that you only need to offer the slightest encouragement for people to act out their darkest prejudices. He made said point brilliantly with Borat, and he’s telling the same joke again. Then again, maybe it stands repeating. 

In cinemas worldwide Fri Oct 23.