‘Ali G: Who Iz I?’ Prime Video Review: Sacha Baron Cohen Resurrects A Relic For A Humiliation Comedy That Wears Thin Fast

Nearly a quarter of a century after his first big-screen appearance (following an initial rise to fame on British television), Sacha Baron Cohen returns to the character who first made him a celebrity: Ali G, a white English guy who adopts the persona of a Jamaican rapper and somehow makes a success of it. The original 2002 film was a more conventional, straightforward comedy. For the sequel, Baron Cohen puts Ali G into the same mockumentary format that worked so well for the Borat films, whose title character eventually became his most famous creation. The idea is that, with a few exceptions, most of the people who appear in the film have no idea they’re taking part in a comedy that, more often than not, is laughing at them.

There’s something inherently amusing about the premise behind Ali G, and it’s tempting to think that Western culture has changed so much over the past quarter-century that a character like him now feels like a relic of another era. That’s precisely the premise behind Who Iz I?, a comedy that’s only occasionally funny. Here, the protagonist sets out to discover whether he’s actually Black or merely appropriating other people’s customs, clothing, mannerisms and language.

An opening recap helps explain where the character stands today. He largely disappeared from the scene after HBO canceled his show, Da Ali G Show (which ran for two seasons, from 2003 to 2004), and few people remember him now. When he learns that his girlfriend Julie (Morgana Robinson, one of the few actual actors in the film) is pregnant, he realizes he needs to do something to provide for his child. A series of misunderstandings leads him to believe HBO has renewed his show, prompting him to head to the United States to start filming. Once there, however, he discovers that no such deal exists and must figure out how to survive.

The other narrative thread involves another character played by Baron Cohen: Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, an extremely politically correct white man who identifies as Black and is determined to prove that Ali G isn’t. To that end, he launches a campaign to expose him and then have him deported. Meanwhile, Ali G takes on various media gigs and, above all, embarks on a crash course in cultural awareness. In his own peculiar way, he tries to understand how the world has changed over the past few decades and why a white rapper who claims to be Black and talks and moves like a Jamaican is now considered offensive and ripe for cancellation.

A few clever jokes and observations emerge from what is essentially a fairly crude comedy built around one humiliation after another. Ali G encounters a variety of people, both ordinary citizens and public figures (most of them not particularly well known outside the United States), engaging them in conversations that quickly become uncomfortable thanks to his clumsy, sexualized or downright ridiculous behavior. In that sense, the film isn’t all that different from Borat, another politically incorrect character who has been somewhat canceled himself, although the angle here is a different one.

The best moments involve Dr. Nira and Erran Morad, the Israeli Mossad agent (also played by Baron Cohen), as they meet with far-right extremist groups that seem willing to buy almost every absurd conspiracy theory either character throws at them. Before long, though, the absurdity gives way to more juvenile humor since Ali G can steer virtually any conversation toward sex within a minute. Still, as he did in the 2020 sequel to Borat, Baron Cohen once again exploits the fact that the ridiculous characters he has created no longer seem all that different from people who actually exist in the world. What once played as parody now looks uncomfortably close to everyday life.

Ali G’s humor rarely works here, and, with a few exceptions, Who Iz I? is banal, repetitive and not particularly funny. I’ve never been especially fond of the humiliating, cringe style of comedy that involves making fools of interview subjects, but my problems with this film have little to do with political correctness or ideological objections. Much of the humor simply feels dated, the material lacks creativity, and too many scenes rely on outlandish situations that might work in a brief sketch but can’t sustain much more than that. The real-world context does help. You only have to watch a few actual streaming channels to realize that some of them aren’t all that different from the one Ali G briefly hosts here. Even so, the film can’t make its jokes hold up over 90 minutes.