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Borat Movie Review

Borat is a 2006 mockumentary comedy film directed by Larry Charles and starring Sasha Baron Cohen. It’s a hilarious movie.

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“You telling me the man who try to put

a rubber fist in my anus was a homosexual?“

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It follows a fictitious Kazakhstani journalist who travels through the United States to make a documentary which features real-life interactions with Americans. Much of the film features unscripted vignettes of Borat interviewing and interacting with real-life Americans who believe he is a foreigner with little or no understanding of American customs. Certainly this approach made the movie incredibly fresh and new. It is unlike any comedy released before it and this originality of it is still respected to this day.

The movie is wildly uneven in quality and in humor as is to be expected from such an episodic approach at storytelling. The pacing can definitely be problematic here and the runtime is too short. I had so much fun with it that I wanted more. One of my favorite parts of this flick is the protagonist’s infatuation with Pamela Anderson. She is a rare person here who was in the know about the whole filming affair, but still the scene where he tries to snatch her is hysterical.

The best parts of the movie usually relate to the scenes where through this ridiculous caricature of a person we get to see the ridiculousness of American society itself. The religious cults are particularly biting as the film made fun of these lunatics in amusingly accurate fashion. The same goes for the sexist men who preach about the glory of slavery and the power of men.

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Another terrific sequence is that dinner scene where he offends everybody there by acting like a complete idiot. The bathroom jokes were vulgar, but so funny. I also loved the scenes in Kazakhstan, though those are sparse. I personally didn’t care all that much about that iconic hotel scene where Borat fights Azamat all naked. It was funny at times, but eventually it wore out its welcome as it went on for way too long, which is a problem that some other sections clearly share.

Sasha Baron Cohen is amazing. This is undoubtedly his most signature role that made him famous throughout the world as this movie made so much money for such a low-budget comedy flick. He is very amusing through and through, especially in his entertaining facial expressions and exaggerations. Among the funniest bits are the many amusing lines of dialogue where we get to see the familiar curses and expressions spoken to us in an all-new, silly way.

The character is excellent. He is this crazy mixture of childish and naïve and very vulgar and crazy. I found his friend Azamat only okay as their scenes could have been better overall. Of course, the film’s ingenious formula to just film many of these people without them knowing produced even funnier results as all of it felt authentic and real. It’s unlike anything we’ve seen before and it remains one of the best mockumentaries out there.

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Borat is solidly directed, but not all that well paced nor structured. There are scenes here that are clearly inferior in comparison to the rest of the scenes, but still most worked out splendidly. The movie is well edited, but again some sequences went on for a tad too long. Although depicting Kazakhstan, the film clearly was shot in Romania and it mostly incorporates Roma people and especially their music (most of it actually from Kusturica’s opus), which made the movie more interesting.