It took me three nights to watch the new Ali G movie, largely because I found it heavy going, both as entertainment and as comedy. But I wanted to persist to the very end so that I could make up my mind about the film as a whole. That felt especially important given the immense criticism thrown at it from all quarters, by moviegoers and critics alike across the world. It made a tremendous loss, came off cinema screens relatively quickly and soon appeared online, where it is now available to stream. Even so, it’s unlikely to reach very many people in the end, and there are good reasons and bad reasons why.
I must admit that 30 years ago, when Ali G was on TV, I thought it was quite funny. I understood it as a British-born Jewish chap taking the mickey out of white working-class people who mimicked the mannerisms and language of Black British popular culture and music as a way of marking themselves out as unique, different or ‘with it’. It was about wanting to be seen as culturally respected, for want of a better phrase. That, ultimately, was the concept three decades ago. It also built on Sacha Baron Cohen’s wider talents for mimicry, mockery and ludicrous prosthetics, hiding behind all sorts of literal masks to play characters who deserve to be laughed at for all their bigotry, racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, patriarchy and downright ridiculousness, whether in Borat, The Dictator or other films that, I confess, I haven’t seen, including the one about the gay fashion designer. Nevertheless, I wanted to see this one simply because of the attention it was getting for being so bad. So, what did I think?
I genuinely tried to laugh wherever I found something funny but, to be perfectly honest, it was hard work. I struggled to find myself chuckling, grinning or amused in any way, largely because the content and style had all been tried and tested before and have remained undeveloped ever since. Arguably, it also misreads the current climate around what is politically and culturally acceptable to mock. At the same time, the reason it failed to resonate with today’s generation was simply that it felt tired, ineffective and laboured, so much so that I never got the sense Sacha Baron Cohen was actually enjoying the process. Sometimes you can see it in his face: the excitement of a joke about to land and the knowledge that he has his audience in the palm of his hand. Perhaps he knew he was taking a risk but went ahead anyway, because the production team had invested in it and it marked his directorial debut. With that in mind, he pressed on, probably through sheer determination.
The storyline follows Ali G discovering that he does, in fact, have Black DNA, which legitimately allows him to keep up his particular persona. Standing in his way is an anti-woke extremist who wants to prove that he is only pretending to be Black or mixed race and is really entirely white, and who will do whatever it takes to stop Ali G proving his identity. Ali G, meanwhile, somehow lands a television show in which he mocks his audiences so profoundly that it becomes quite disturbing. Some would say it borders on anti-Semitic, but he is Jewish himself, so he has a certain licence, much as Mel Brooks did, or Woody Allen in the 1970s.
The story builds to a crescendo of ridiculousness, in which ordinary and, it would seem, mainly disillusioned, disaffected, isolated and alienated men, young and old, are easily duped into believing what they are told and carry out various actions that would land them in real trouble in any other setting. They are clearly presented as idiots with no minds of their own, incapable of any critical engagement. Segments featuring older white Republican men are also part of the mix. Because this is, in effect, a kind of mockumentary, it simply highlights how very out of touch some people are. I laughed out loud at only one scene, near the end, because it was so extraordinarily absurd: it involved babies, fake Mossad security and, at one point, Ali G playing three people on screen at the same time. The logistics alone must have been incredible, but in the end it worked. It put a wry smile on my face as I thought to myself that he had pushed this as far as anyone could conceivably go. It has almost certainly offended everybody on the entire planet, which was presumably the aim in the first place. Then, rather abruptly, it ends, and that was that.
Overall, I found it a little excruciating: the pacing was all over the place and it never quite came together. Even so, it was fascinating to watch how easily minds, young and old alike, can be fooled, and what kinds of content shape that sort of cognitive processing. This connects with my wider work on polarisation and extremism, and on the various ways people are affected by discourse. I could see it in action as men of all ages fell for these fanciful tricks, which in some ways confirms that some members of society are simply out of touch, cannot think for themselves and will therefore believe almost anything, because their outlook has been reduced to black-and-white cognition. Importantly, that is the basis of an inability to learn. As a film, though, it has its moments, and it does get a little better in the last third, if you can make it that far. All in all, it’s not an unsurprising package, and it delivers on pushing the boundaries to the limit.
The question is whether, in 2026, the landscape for such a film has completely disappeared. And has Sacha Baron Cohen run out of ideas? On the latter front, I hope not. I still think he’s a talent, even though some of his views in recent years, on Israel and the impact of the war on Gaza, and on how anti-Semitism is framed today, have been highly polarising, and that has somewhat dimmed my view of his ability to cut through. That said, he does manage to offend just about everybody with this film, which is quite a feat. It’s really only worth watching if you’ve got nothing better to do, but given the dearth of good films at the moment, it might be worth a look just for the hell of it, simply to see how it has been put together and why it fails to deliver. And if you were watching him 30 years ago, you can see the evolution, or lack of it, for yourself.