A fake Kazakhstan Film Commission seal fills the screen. A second mock seal follows it. Then the camera finds Borat Sagdiyev (Sacha Baron Cohen), seated at a desk with a hand-drawn map of Kazakhstan behind him and the national flag at his shoulder, delivering the address in the same deadpan documentary style the character has used for years. He tells the audience he has “grave warning” to deliver. That cold open belongs to the second trailer for “Ali G: Who Iz I?” It is doing something stranger than the usual marketing beat. One of Cohen’s characters is vouching for another, and the one being vouched for, Ali G, has not headlined a film in more than twenty years.
Sacha Baron Cohen directs “Ali G: Who Iz I?” himself, his feature directorial debut after a quarter century of handing his characters to other filmmakers. Amazon MGM Studios is releasing it into theaters only, for one weekend, starting October 23rd. That theatrical-only, one-weekend plan is a notable break from how Amazon handled “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” in 2020, which went straight to Prime Video. A studio with every incentive to just drop this quietly onto a streaming service has instead decided the character needs an opening weekend and a ticket price. Cohen also produces. The film was shot in secret, the same undercover method behind “Borat,” “Brüno” and “Who Is America?” Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for what the trailer itself reveals about “Ali G: Who Iz I?”, including the shape of its plot and the characters Cohen is bringing back.
It is doing something stranger than the usual marketing beat. One of Cohen’s characters is vouching for another, and the one being vouched for, Ali G, has not headlined a film in more than twenty years.”
The official synopsis gives the plot a shape that is pure Ali G, framed as a sequel to a life rather than to a film: “After twenty years spent ‘chillin’, tokin’ and bonin”, Ali G is shocked to discover that his long-term girlfriend, Julie, is eight months pregnant. Faced with an extra mouth to feed, he gets off his batty and heads to America to reclaim his former glory… but soon encounters adversaries who will ultimately threaten his and his child’s very existence.” Morgana Robinson plays Julie in this version, stepping into the role Kellie Bright played in 2002’s “Ali G Indahouse.” That film, the last Ali G feature before this one, dropped the mockumentary format, and this new movie seems to be trying to bring it back.
Borat’s framing device is where the trailer gets its structure, and it is a clever one. He explains that Cohen made this documentary “by infiltrating American society” undetected for two years, doing it, in Borat’s words, “by shapeshifting… into three different devils.” That line is the trailer’s organizing joke. Cohen is playing three separate characters here, and the cut walks through each one in turn like a rogues’ gallery rather than a conventional plot summary.
The first devil is Ali G himself, reintroduced through a clip from the film. He asks someone where the durag “originated from,” gets the answer “China,” and fires back, flatly, “No, it’s not.” It is a small exchange, but it sets the character’s comic engine running again immediately: supreme, misplaced confidence about a culture he has appointed himself an authority on. Borat introduces the second devil as “a member of a terrorist hate group called liberals,” and the trailer cuts to an activist calling Ali G “a cultural appropriator” for using the Jamaican word “punani.” Ali G’s retort, that she is the one who stole the word and “put it in his mouth,” is circular, self-justifying logic the character has always run on. It is just aimed now at a culture-war language that barely existed when “Da Ali G Show” was on the air.
The third devil is Colonel Erran Morad, the Israeli ex-special-forces character from “Who Is America?”, introduced here with a joke about having “muscles almost as big as my wife.” The trailer gives him its sharpest-edged bit: a mock anti-immigrant speech. He delivers it in a gym full of punching bags and gym rings, to a room of recruits who later appear at a shooting range wearing “Trump Is My President” and American-flag T-shirts. Morad tells them immigrants “are not coming here to mow your lawn… they are coming to kill you.” One trainee answers back with an approving “Oh yeah, man,” and that might be the trailer’s bleakest joke, precisely because it plays the agreement completely straight.
All three characters sit inside a real-world controversy that the trailer is openly, deliberately engaging with rather than ignoring. After the first ‘Who Iz I?’ trailer dropped in August, the AI-powered media-monitoring site NewsCord launched a campaign. It urged theaters to “leave the film off its screens,” sending more than 40,000 emails. The campaign framed Ali G, in its own words, as “a cover to laugh at Jamaican culture” that “enforces harmful stereotypes of how a Jamaican man behaves in society.” UK chain Picturehouse Cinemas responded that it is “not planning to screen the film,” and NewsCord says it sent similar emails to at least fifteen other chains worldwide. That is the real backlash Borat is supposedly “reporting” on when he opens trailer two with his grave warning, which is why the line lands as satire rather than simple misdirection: “There have been reportings that this film is racist. We have seen it, and sadly it is not.”
The trailer closes by turning the real boycott campaign into an in-character bit of its own, which feels like the whole point of resurrecting Borat for this specific job rather than just having Cohen talk to press as himself. “Kazakhstan is very angry by this movie film and will not show it in either of our two cinemas,” Borat says, before adding, “We ask you please for the sake of decency and humanity, join in our boycott. We urge you, do not watch this movie film in the cinemas on October 23rd.” It closes on a gold “Ali G” logo card ringed with the word for “boycott,” then a “DO NOT SEE” title card stamped over the giant blue puffer coat that has become this campaign’s recurring visual gag. The MPA’s R rating, for “crude/sexual content, graphic nudity, language, and drug use,” sits right there on screen too, which is its own small joke about what the ratings board actually objects to versus what the online campaign does.
It helps to remember how this all got rolling. Cohen revealed the title and release date back in July, posting an Instagram video in character as Ali G that read, in part, “Dey haz finally made a documentary about me… ‘Ali G: Who Iz I?’ Cominatcha on 10.23 wotever dat means.” Ten days before that, he turned up at the Wimbledon men’s final dressed as the character, joking on Instagram about selling weed to the crowd. None of that is subtle, and it does not need to be. The character’s whole comic premise has always been obliviousness performed with total sincerity, and that is exactly the tone this second trailer is betting an entire theatrical release on.
Whether that bet pays off probably depends on how much goodwill a twenty-year gap can preserve, and that is an open question. The culture Ali G was built to satirize in 1998 is not the same culture now arguing about him on the exact platforms NewsCord used to organize its boycott. Cohen is clearly aiming this trailer straight at that backlash instead of around it. A film willing to put its own backlash into its own marketing at least suggests somebody involved is paying closer attention than the outrage assumes.
What Do You Think? Does turning a real boycott campaign into an in-character joke defuse the backlash or just confirm what NewsCord is arguing? Which of Cohen’s three devils do you think carries the most screen time once the film actually opens? And after twenty years away, does Borat delivering the defense work better than Cohen simply speaking as himself would have?
See you on the next binge!
