Ali G opens his own trailer by explaining where he has been, and the answer is the funniest thing in it. “Yo, it’s me, Ali G,” he says, straight down the lens in a rasta hat and wraparound shades. “I’s been gone for 20 years, chilling. And in that time, the world went to crap. There was COVID, wars,” and then, after a beat exactly long enough to land, “and Ed Sheeran.” The trailer cuts to genuine red carpet footage of Ed Sheeran on the Met Gala steps in a pale blue suit while the line hangs there. That is the whole pitch for “Ali G: Who Iz I?” in eleven seconds. The character has not changed at all, the world around him has changed completely, and Sacha Baron Cohen is betting the gap between those two facts is still worth a feature film.
Amazon MGM Studios dropped the first trailer on 25 August, and the release details carry a genuine surprise. The film lands on 23 October and it is going out in cinemas only, not to Prime Video, which is not what Amazon did with “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” in 2020. Cohen directs, and this is his feature directorial debut after twenty five years of handing his characters to other people. Morgana Robinson plays Julie, Ali G’s girlfriend. It was shot in secret over more than a year, the same way “Borat,” “Brüno” and “Who Is America?” were made, and it is the first Ali G feature since “Ali G Indahouse” in 2002.
The character has not changed at all, the world around him has changed completely, and Sacha Baron Cohen is betting the gap between those two facts is still worth a feature film.”
The format is the news here, and it is a reversal nobody should skip past. “Ali G Indahouse” was a scripted comedy with a cast, a plot and professional actors playing every part. This is the opposite: the trailer’s own voiceover promises “a film with real people, not actors,” and Ali G describes the project as “a brand new thing called a documentary,” which is the joke, because the documentary is the oldest tool in Cohen’s box. He has run this play on Borat, on Brüno and on the four characters in “Who Is America?” He has never once run it on Ali G at feature length. Twenty four years after the character got a conventional movie, he is finally getting the one that suits him.
What that looks like on screen is a man in absurd clothing being taken seriously by people who should know better. The trailer moves fast through it: Ali G smoking on a wet high street at night, in a Kansas City Chiefs jersey, in a hi-vis vest on a motorway verge, and in a blue puffer coat so enormous it fills a doorway. He turns up at a shooting range in front of paper targets with three heavily tattooed men. He sits in a vape shop lit like a fairground. He holds court at the head of a long dinner table in a wood. He works a TikTok livestream while the comment feed scrolls across the screen beside him, which is the closest the film gets to acknowledging that the internet ate the culture Ali G used to parody.
The spine underneath all of it is a pregnancy, and it looks like the emotional engine rather than a runner. Julie is heavily pregnant across most of the trailer, and Ali G’s response is to sit opposite what appears to be a medical professional and ask him to tell her she is imagining it. “You don’t think she’s pregnant?” the man asks. He is holding the test. There are clinic waiting rooms, a scan appointment, a consultant losing patience behind a desk, and a baby shower with balloons. Someone asks him what kind of father he wants to be and he answers “thinking absent” without a flicker. It is a real structure, which is the thing “Borat” understood and most ambush comedies do not.
And then there is the interview, which is the reason this character existed in the first place. The trailer gives one away: a serious man in a serious office is asked, “How dangerous is Iran?” and answers, at length and in complete earnest, that Iran is the single most dangerous country in the world. Ali G’s follow up is about a nuclear weapons programme, delivered with the confidence of a man who has read nothing. That exchange is structurally identical to the ones Cohen was running on politicians and generals in 1999, and the fact that it still works on a 2026 expert is either encouraging or extremely depressing, depending on how you feel about the last twenty five years.
The honest question is whether this can still land, and the trailer does not entirely dodge it. Cohen’s face is one of the most recognisable in comedy now, which is the exact problem that made “Who Is America?” a harder watch than it should have been: half the tension of an ambush is that the mark does not know. There is also a moment in this trailer where a member of the public turns on him with real hostility, in language we are not going to reprint, and the film keeps it in. That is either the most honest thing in the cut or a warning about what a year of this actually looked like on the ground. Cohen has always been willing to leave the failures in, which is more than most.
The cinema decision is the part we keep coming back to. Amazon put “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” straight onto its streaming service in October 2020, and that was a pandemic call as much as a strategic one, but it set a pattern. Sending this one to theatres only, in late October, against a crowded autumn, says somebody believes it plays to a room. That is not a small claim about a comedy built from stunts, because the whole genre lives or dies on collective reaction, and a laugh in a full cinema is worth about four laughs on a sofa. It is also a decision that will be extremely visible if it does not work.
So the read from here is cautious optimism, weighted toward the fact that Cohen has never been the problem. The character is a broad joke about a suburban English kid who thinks he is from South Central, and that joke has aged in complicated ways. What has not aged is the technique: real people, a straight face, and the patience to let somebody talk themselves into a hole. If the pregnancy plot gives him a spine to hang the stunts on, the way Borat’s road trip did, this works. If it is a run of sketches with a baby bump between them, it will feel like a nostalgia act. The trailer suggests the former, and the trailer is also, obviously, an advert.
What Do You Think? Does Ali G still have something to say about 2026, or is the culture he was built to mock already gone? Can the ambush format work when everyone on earth knows what Sacha Baron Cohen looks like, or is the secret filming doing more work than we realise? And is cinemas-only a vote of confidence or a mistake that Prime Video would have quietly absorbed?
See you on the next binge!
