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Back in the day (as he would have put it), Ali G was my favorite Sacha Baron Cohen character. In the ’90s and early 2000s, there was something exquisitely daft about his track suit and do-rag wave cap, his “street”
Cockney Jafaican patois, his insanely stunted worldview and brain-dead malapropisms (“Does you think that men should marry only one woman? Does you believe in mahogany?”), and in the more than slightly absurd Method commitment with which Baron Cohen immersed himself in the character.
That said, Ali G would never have been more than an inspired sketch-comedy jape if it hadn’t been for all the politicians and public figures he interviewed — a parade of po-faced luminaries (Donald Trump, Ralph Nader, Buzz Aldrin, Christie Todd Whitman, Sam Donaldson), none of whom had any idea that they were being punked by a walking put-on. I’ll never forget the look on Pat Buchanan’s face when Ali G asked him if the U.S. had found “BLTs” in Iraq.
But that was then. The joke of Ali G is that he was a maximally clueless white-bro poseur (a ripely legitimate topic for satire, since millions of white kids in Britain and the U.S. had mindlessly appropriated the style and attitude and language of hip-hop culture). But it’s a joke of its era that sits uncomfortably in the world of today. In 2026, the character of Ali G is so out of step that his presence now risks playing as an ironic nostalgic celebration of something it once – rightfully — skewered.
“Ali G: Who Iz I?” is a movie that would like to do for Ali G what “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” (2006) did for Borat and “Bruno” (2009) did for Bruno. Except that the new movie, which Baron Cohen directed himself, isn’t like those other films. They were guerrilla comedies, more documentary than not (pundits have been drawing comparison between “You Can See Everything” and “Borat”), in which the bulk of the comedy consisted of Borat or Bruno talking to ordinary Americans, who didn’t know they were being pranked, in a way that unmasked their idiocies and prejudices.
There’s some of that in “Ali G: Who Iz I?,” but it’s all fairly minor and neutral. When Ali G’s romantic partner, Julie (Morgana Robinson), who’s pregnant with their child, attempts to purchase a mansion in Bel Air, the real-estate agent is the “straight” character (i.e., he’s not in on the joke), but he’s treated with total dignity. He’s just there to shuttle increasingly extreme messages back and forth between Ali G and Julie in what becomes a glorified comedy routine.
There’s a scene with a liquor-store salesman who, likewise, isn’t the butt of the joke. And there are several scenes in which Baron Cohen, in character, talks to groups of people sitting in rows in meeting rooms — and what he says is so appalling that they walk out, or simply turn on him. These vérité extras aren’t there so that the film can ridicule or belittle them; they come off just fine. At the climax, a handful of right-wing would-be militia men are used as the butt of the joke in an elaborate sequence that’s all about foiling terrorists. (It’s also arrested in a “Jackass”/”Beavis and Butt-Head” way.) But it’s too little, too late. If the intent of “Ali G: Who Iz I?” is to reveal and skewer America today, as “Borat” did to the America of the 2000s, the film mostly misses its mark.
But that’s not its intent. Sacha Baron Cohen has stated, in interviews and in a lofty cover essay in Time magazine, that the real reason he wanted to bring Ali G back is precisely because the character is now so dated and “problematic.” Between innocuous guerrilla bits, “Who Iz I?” really is about Ali G. He shows up in his bling, with his dreds tucked under a rastacap, and the movie proceeds to deconstruct what a relic he is (he has a testy back and forth with a DEI counselor), goofing on his attitudes even as it’s milking them for cheap laughs.
It also introduces Ali G’s foil, a professor named Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, also played by Baron Cohen, buried under latex prosthetics and a costume that turns him into a 70ish left-wing boomer (balding pate and ponytail, arrogant bullfrog jowls, wire-framed glasses, patterned sweaters), with a whiny voice of voracious high-mindedness. He’s the film’s parody of “wokeness.” “Who Iz I?” mocks Ali G, and it also mocks the geek adversary who will do anything to shut him down. The movie is trying to be an equal-opportunity drive-by farce for the age of toxic extremes. At one point, as Ali puts it, “Me was cancelized.”
But here’s the problem. By turning Ali G into the doofus antihero of his own absurdist saga, “Who Iz I?” becomes Sacha Baron Cohen’s version of a “Saturday Night Live” movie, like “MacGruber” or “Stuart Saves His Family” or “A Night at the Roxbury.” The film has a few scattered giggles, but it’s dawdling and cumbersome, and far less “relevant” than it thinks. For a brief spell, Ali falls under the delusion that he’s the biological son of A$AP Rocky, and this makes for comedy that’s both intentionally and unintentionally cringe. To prove that Ali is white, the professor needs a DNA sample, and the sequence in which he gets it plays to the yahoo peanut gallery.
Ali G and Julie, flat broke, have arrived in L.A. because Ali thinks he can revive his talk-show series that ran for two seasons on HBO. (It ended in 2004.) When it turns out that he can’t, he falls into the grip of a right-wing network that’s willing to feature him as the host of “The Free Speech Show.” There’s fascist banter and Elon Musk stiff-arm salutes. Baron Cohen also plays Col. Erran Morad, the former Mossad agent who speaks in a thick Israeli accent (he’s the least funny of the three characters). Morad spearheads the kidnapping of Julie, who gives birth in a scene of gonzo fakery, with the militia men acting as obstetricians.
Even in my days of Ali G fanhood, when I found him to be a delectable idiot, he was most funny as a talk-show stooge. It’s not as if I wanted to know his backstory or watch him go through the motions of an ersatz rescue thriller. But “Ali G: Who Iz I?” lays on that stuff, because the film is so busy working to justify its existence that it makes the mistake of pretending that Ali G “matters.”
