Ali G: Who Iz I?

When is a joke simply outdated and when is a comedy ripe for revisiting?

It’s a particularly tenuous topic as tastes change and the tightrope of what is appropriate gets thinner.

If the upcoming Inbetweeners sequel is one to be tentatively nervous about ruining an immaculate legacy, what about Ali G?

An icon of a bygone era, but one that very much feels particularly ‘of’ that era, Sacha Baron Cohen has nonetheless brought him back for Ali G: Who Iz I?

His viral stunts teasing and promoting the film online (the Wimbledon Final, the London Underground lookalike march) were brilliant and about half of this new film is equally so. The other, not so much.

Ali G Indahouse is a classic for a certain generation. An outdated but endlessly revisitable quote-a-thon.

Baron Cohen then somehow superseded its influence and ubiquity with Borat and the watch-through-your-fingers cringe of real life interactions.

Of course, this is something he did with Ali G as well back in the television days and this new film makes a bizarre attempt to sort of combine the two.

So it’s a faux-documentary style film telling the story of Ali G all these years later who heads to the US to ostensibly film a new series of his show.

In trying to create the plot around this idea, we get two new Baron Cohen creations and a series of escalating set pieces ever more wild in their craziness but shot professionally rather than with a hidden camera.

It’s a strange one. Baron Cohen always knows how to push these real scenes to their absolute limit and there is some shocking things here that you won’t believe are real (a gameshow and a drone scene are beyond disturbing) and his bravery and willingness to find that line is always a commendable thing.

However, there are still a lot of quirks of the character that are so deeply ingrained that he can’t move on from them and too much of that perhaps will cross over the taste line for many.

Of course, there are multiple instances where those who have ever enjoyed this character will laugh out loud but the film as an overall experience is a little too tonally jarring and mismatched to compare to the two big hitters in Baron Cohen’s oeuvre (the aforementioned Indahouse and Borat.)

This is, therefore, far more in line with his subsequent work. Lots to enjoy and plenty of laughs to be had but a joke that perhaps half belongs in the past.

⭐️⭐️⭐️