Ali G: Who iz I?

 Sasha Baron Cohen's new picture, Ali G: Who iz I? has a narrative of sorts aided and abetted by various dupes that the director cons into appearing in the film.  The movie is intermittently very funny but, like all Cohen's pictures, the story of the film's making and the elaborate pranks that are played on his hapless victims is probably more interesting than anything on-screen.  Cohen's movies posit that the embarrassing (and, in this case, probably criminal) behavior that he cons his participants into displaying for the camera is a form of revelation -- Cohen is merely midwifing into existence vicious traits that are latent in his marks.  However, there is a sour taste of condescension to many of the more outrageous sequences -- it's not a crime or, even, vice to be extremely stupid and Cohen launches his pranks with cosmopolitan sophistication using all the resources of movie magic at his disposal against some very dim bulbs indeed.  The gags in which he entangles his unwitting protagonists are exceptionally complicated and, indeed, expensive -- they rely on carefully selected confederates, long and elaborate quasi-military training sessions that invest his dupes in the action, prosthetics and movie-grade special effects.  In the face of these highly engineered resources invested in what are essentially mean-spirited practical jokes, his moronic interlocutors have little or no ability to resist the deception practiced against them -- often, the movie feels like the highly sophisticated London comedian "punching down" on poor fools who are the worst kinds of fools, that is people who don't know that they are idiots.

The film's narrative involves Ali G, fallen on hard times, with no money and his baronial mansion repossessed.  (For the uninitiated, Ali G is a caricature of a certain kind of Londoner who will be unknown to most Americans -- Ali G is a white hipster who speaks in a bizarre sort of quasi-Jamaican patois, dresses in elaborate Afro-futurist garb, and fancies himself a multicultural nomad with sufficient self-esteem to confidently interview Nobel physicists, politicians like Newt Gingrich and other Republicans, and cultural figures.  He has the temerity to ask the astronaut "Buzz" Aldrin for an opinion as to whether man "will ever walk on the sun.") Al G's longtime girlfriend, who is equally dim, is heavily pregnant and the plot, as it were, involves his agonized conflict between pursuing his career as a hip-hop pundit and interviewer or retiring to England to be a good father to his prospective progeny.  Ali G is on hiatus from his show at HBO, a 20 year lay-off as it happens, but is scheming to get back in the good graces of the Cable company so that he can return to the air.  He believes HBO has sent him a fax offering him 3.2 million dollars to do another program and so with "Me Julie" as he calls his girlfriend, he flies to Hollywood to return to show business.  But it turns out that the fax from HBO, discovered when Ali has to pawn his old fax machine (when it's plugged in, the thing spits out a letter from HBO) was sent in 2004 and the offer is no longer valid.  This proves highly embarrassing to Ali who has invited his agent and about 10 sycophants to an expensive banquet (over $12,000 not including tip).  Ali's "Me Julie" has bought a Brentwood Mansion for thirty million dollars but, alas, Ali has no money to pay for the dwelling.  Like Peter Sellers, Sasha Baron Cohen performs several different roles in his movies.  In this film, he goes about disguised as a vengeful ultra-woke Liberal, who insults a conference of Black participants in Oakland by railing against Ali G for having "appropriated wrongfully" Black culture.  He tells the people at the conference, who roll their eyes and walk out on him, that Ali G is an imposter and that they are insufficiently incensed about Ali's depredations.  A question arises as to whether Ali G has any African blood in him at all.  This leads to a subplot in which Ali has anal sex with the liberal who is using his rectum as a depository for DNA that he will use to show that Ali is English (or Scottish as it happens) but not Black at all.  Meanwhile, Cohen as a vicious Israeli spy ("not a member of Mossad" he repeatedly says) recruits a group of right-wing morons to kidnap Ali's "Me Julie".  The claim is that Ali is a terrorist so sexually active that he has 140,000 children, an army waiting to be activated as a Fifth Column in southern California.  If Ali and Julie's baby is born on American soil, it will be a birth right citizen, thus naturalizing (somehow) the other 140,000 nascent terrorists who are all members of the same family.  The not-Mossad spy and his recruits load Julie into a panel truck and drive her to the border with Mexico.  She, then, gives birth in a graphic and disgusting scene, sufficiently gruesome to persuade the Right Wing Republicans, that they have a real terrorist baby in their clutches.  Believing that the animatronic baby is real, they load the kid onto a drone and, then, literally drop what they believe is a living infant, about sixty feet out of sky into Mexico.  The leftist woke professor appears and there's a shoot-out.  The not-Mossad Israeli agent provocateur has equipped the Republican dupes with bulging fake buttocks that shoot bullets out of the anus.  The buttock gun is armed by using a prosthetic penis to pump pressure into the air gun rectum.  This means that in the shoot-out the Republican marks are vigorously pumping their penises to generate sufficient force to fire projectiles out of their prosthetic anus muzzles.  Ali has been working on a Cable show produced by a malign South American called "Free Speech".  On that show, Ali as host supervises a game show in which contestants pick up mannequins (men, women and infants) and hurl them into a mock-up of a concentration camp shower facility in which the spigots pump out Zyklon B.  Ali's contestants who enthusiastically load the shower-execution chambers include some other right-wing figures including George Santos.  In the end after the baby is rescued and the buttock-gun shoot out results in the death of the liberal professor, Ali decides that it is best that he remain with Me Julie in England and try to be a better man by serving as a responsible father to his new infant.  It's a sentimental and heart-warming ending for the movie.

This sort of thing is a matter of taste.  It's amusing to see right-wing bigots exposed as Hitler-adoring Fascists, but the pranks are so incredibly complicated and far-fetched that it's hard to know whether the dupes are really participating or just humoring Ali G who seems to be insane.  (George Santos, for instance, is obviously in on the joke.)  I'm always a wee bit suspicious of comedy that plays so explicitly upon the viewer's biases and prejudices -- although most comedy has some element of this sort of derision and comedy, as it is often, said is not pretty picture but really a carnival of cruelty.  There are moments of comic genius in the film and it is sometimes very funny, but there's a element of cruelty to the pranks which is troubling.  At the end of the movie, one of the dupes of the "woke" professor character kindly consoles Al G who is weeping when his heritage is exposed to him.  "There's nothing wrong with being a 'proud Scottish man'," the man says.