The sequel to the iconic comedic film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is in my opinion, even better than the first. Oftentimes, sequels to films are terrible and drag the story on too long. However, Sachs Baron Cohen’s latest mockumentary is an exception to this unwritten rule. Cohen’s new film Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan allows audiences to be reunited with everyone’s favorite Kazakh reporter, Borat Sagdiyev, who travels to America to film a documentary for his home country, Kazakhstan. This film was released on October 23, 2020, on Amazon Prime, and has had fans roaring with laughter ever since.
In this sequel, Borat’s story resumes just after the release of his previous documentary. After failing his people and making Kazakhstan the laughing stock of the world, Borat is sent to serve time in prison for the rest of his life. To his surprise, one day Kazakh Premier Nursultan Nazarbayev gives Borat his old job back and sends him back to the United States to repair relations between the two nations and impress prominent American politicians. Borat’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Tutar, Sagdiyev, is introduced in this new film as she accompanies him to the States. After accidentally bringing his daughter with him to America, Borat comes up with a plan to give her as a gift to the former Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence. After this mission fails, Borat then redirects his plan and grooms his daughter to be a gift to former President Donald Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani.
Just like in the first film, this satirical mockumentary is filled with sexist messages indicating that women are meant to be subservient to men and are more like objects than people. Throughout the majority of the film, Tutar sleeps in a cage at night and follows her father’s every command blindly. In order to prepare his daughter to be a perfect gift for U.S. political figures, Borat has Tutar undergo a complete makeover including a wardrobe change, hair cut, and debutante training. He even attempts to convince her to have extensive plastic surgery in order to be beautiful enough for an American politician.
After Borat and Tutar have a falling out and split up, Borat tries to regain his daughter’s trust and go through with his plan to present her to Giuliani. While he cannot convince her to join him, Tutar follows through with her father’s plan on her own. In order to fulfill her father’s wishes, Tutar comes up with a plan to seduce Giuliani, who is under the guise that she will interview him. After the interview, Giuliani makes sexual advances towards Tutar which she is prepared to comply with until her father comes to her rescue. Borat offers himself to Giuliani in his daughter’s place, and both are subsequently kicked out of the hotel room.
After their mission has failed to impress American politicians, Borat and Tutar return to Kazakhstan, facing execution side by side. Once they return to Kazakhstan, the two learn that Premier Nazarbayev had lied to them and sent them to the United State to spread COVID-19 (as revenge for laughing at Kazakhstan fifteen years ago). After gaining this knowledge, Borat and Tutar then blackmail Kazakh Premier Nazarbayev to give Borat his job back and change the country’s sexist laws. The film ends with the father-daughter pair reporting together happily, promoting feminism.
This witty, poignant film ends on a surprisingly sweet note, concluding Borat’s hilarious story.
This sequel, released fifteen years after the first movie, is somehow even better than the previous cult classic comedy. Although the first film is wonderfully funny, Borat does not seem to go through a character transformation in the end. In this new sequel, Borat’s mindset does a 360 and by the end of the film, he is a news reporter with the same ridiculously dirty sense of humor.
In a recent interview with Good Morning America, British actor Cohen and actress Maria Bakalova (who played Tutar) talked about filming the sequel and their experiences traveling the United States. In the first film, the interviewer mentioned that Cohen had previously stated that his mission was to “reveal America’s inner racism.” Nearly two decades later, when asked the same question, Cohen explained his mission with this film, “What I actually wanted to do is to reveal that underneath all the hatred and underneath all of the division, that we are actually not that far apart. We are good people, people who you would despise normally. I tried to get people from both sides. I wanted to show the humanity.”
I believe that Cohen and Bakalova were successful in their aims, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching the film. I laughed and cried for 96 minutes straight and would recommend this movie to anyone. If you need a good belly laugh, go watch the new Borat Subsequent Moviefilm on Amazon Prime, I promise you won’t regret it.