Borat: An unintended parody

When Borat burst onto the scene in the sketch-based British TV Series and the movie from 2006, it shocked and astounded audiences.

Borat was crude, lewd, vulgar, unhygienic, and ignorant, but what made it worst that despite his abominable utterances he was likable. The character was a product of his circumstance and knew no better. Creator Sacha Baron Cohen used Borat in his semi-reality show to expose the innate bigotry among right-wingers, primarily Bush supporters.

But what shocks you today, tomorrow, next month, and perhaps through the year will eventually lose its novelty and will begin to appear stale and boring. Borat was the flavor of his time but is by no means timeless. 

The Borat phenomenon is not dissimilar to Jim Carrey whose wild antics captivated audiences such that his films topped the box office all through the nineties. But Carrey fell out of favor once the audience grew accustomed/tired to his ways. While Carrey’s scale of popularity was astronomically higher than that of Borat, the novelty of the shock value was identical.

Such was the success of Borat that it made 262 million dollars worldwide and rave reviews from critics.

Sacha Baron Cohen attempted to repeat the Borat phenomenon in Bruno but failed spectacularly. His other efforts such as The Dictator and The Brother Grimsby also were box office bombs and received mixed reviews.

Thus in an attempt to regenerate box office success, we have a sequel to Borat. His target this time was Donald Trump.

The venture fails spectacularly for two major reasons.

The first is the fact that Borat ceases to astound and that Cohen seems to have lost the ability to play Borat while maintaining his likability. We thus have a crude caricature of a crude caricature.

The second major reason is that for over four years, every mainstream news show, tv show, web series, movies, late-night comedy shows, showbiz award shows and even sports broadcasts have been turned into vicious anti-Trump propaganda. It is just another entry in an already crowded field of smug liberals mocking Trump and his supporters, an also-ran rather than a novelty. 

To sum it up, the movie is a sequence of half-formed, indifferently recycled, and randomly put together sketches that should have been released on YouTube.