Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Khazakhstan

Review by Clint Morris

He too wears skimpy clothes, has a brain the size of a microchip, sees women as meat, and struggles to explain himself in a concise sentence – but thankfully, ‘Borat’ is a lot funnier than Warwick Capper.

In his second TV-skit-turned-film – the first being the one-joke disappointment, Ali G in Da House – Sacha Baron Cohen, playing the main role of Borat, kicks a lot more goals too, slicing one straight through the goal posts at least eight times out of ten.

Granted, most of the bank that Borat is going to make – or made, as is now the case – has been in the USA, where Sacha Baron Cohen is far less well known than in Europe. Have you seen how much this thing brought in at the U.S box office on its first week of release?!

This impressive glut of revenue can be attributed to the film’s continuous publicity and marketing campaign. Months before the print was even locked, the film was an instant curiosity because of the trouble that Cohen had caused whilst filming the movie in the States – attendees of a Texas Rodeo nearly ate him alive, he was punched in the face by a New Yorker for harassment, and was kicked out of at least one in three of the businesses or homes he invaded – usually for his anti-Semitic remarks. 

But more so, it's Twentieth Century Fox’s fabulous marketing of the movie that will/has been putting bums on seats. From having Cohen tour the globe ‘as Borat’, to cutting a wildly amusing trailer, they’ve done a wonderful job at marketing this thing.

Not to say the film itself isn’t funny – it is; in fact it’s very funny. It’s not the character himself who gets the laughs per se, but more so the situations he gets himself into.

In the pic, the fictional Kazakh journalist heads to America. He’s supposedly there to file a story on the ‘greatest country in the world’ – which is a cue for a sequence of embellished and droll cultural differences – but ends up falling in love with a woman he catches on TV, Pamela Anderson. It’s then that he decides to head to California to wed the ‘Baywatch Babe’.

There are moments in the film that will truly have you busting a gut. His broken English is quite amusing, but there are couple of scenes in particular – one of which involves a repugnantly overweight man, completely buck naked, wrestling with Borat – that made me laugh so much I almost vomited and/or choked on my own saliva. 

Now that’s a quote you want on a poster, right?

Now that the joke’s out of the bag, and people will know who Borat is when they see him coming – this time, many took him for a real foreign journalist – a sequel’s going to be a tough trick to pull off. Not that they won’t try...

3.5 out of 5

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Australian release: 23rd November, 2006
Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Ken Davitian, Luenell, Pamela Anderson
Director: Larry Charles
Website: Click here.