Borat Subsequent Moviefilm Parent Guide

The fallout of his 2006 trip to America left Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) out of favor in his homeland of Kazakhstan. He’s spent the past 14 years in a gulag doing hard manual labor. But Premier Nazarbayexdv (Dani Popescu) has a new plan for Borat. Since the election of Donald Trump, the Premier has noticed that countries with despotic leaders seem to be making fast friends with the new president. All except him. To get Kazakhstan back into America’s good books, the Premier is sending Borat to America to gift Vice-President Mike Pence with a TV star from Kazakhstan – a monkey named Johnny.

Is the gift going to be a diplomatic home run? We’ll never know because when Borat arrives in Texas and opens the monkey’s crate, his fifteen-year-old daughter, Tutar (Maria Bakalova), tumbles out, covered in monkey blood, and ready to live a new life in the USA. Although the gift has been eaten, Borat thinks fast, and decides to give his daughter to Mike Pence instead. Back on track, Borat and his daughter set out to make Kazakhstan great again through a combination of anti-Semitism, science denial, and raging misogyny.

Okay if you didn’t already guess, this is reeeeally not a movie you’re going to want to watch. If you care enough about content that you read this website, then watching this movie is probably going to be something you enjoy about as much as sticking your head in your microwave. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many different sets of male genitals, both real and fake, in one movie. I really never expected to see this many outside of a YMCA locker room, if we’re being honest.

But sure, let’s say you’re somehow comfortable with frequent male nudity. Now you just have to be comfortable with the constant graphic sexual language and horrifying anti-Semitism. Sacha Baron Cohen was raised Jewish, and the anti-Semitism is clearly designed to be provocative and satirical – none of which makes it any more pleasant to watch. Showing up in a synagogue dressed in a costume that I can best describe as a Nazi propaganda poster brought to life is really, really gross, and I can’t imagine who would laugh at this.

The real problem with this movie is less the film itself than the people Cohen is satirizing. A lot of the time, Borat is the worst person in the room, being deliberately offensive and inflammatory, relying entirely on people’s good manners to avoid being pummeled. But in a number of scenes, reality is somehow worse than the moments dreamed up in Cohen’s disturbing imagination. The Macon Debutante Ball, (which occurs in the real world) features some of the most disgusting and unprompted behavior in the movie. Or, in the more newsworthy incident, there’s the part where Tutar satirically seduces Rudy Giuliani…and it works. What Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm does is highlight some of the truly atrocious behavior present in the public sphere today, and the rampant stupidity which accompanies it. That’s the movie’s intent. Thankfully, it also shows that there are a number of kind-hearted, intelligent people around… but boy, it’s a small number.