The less interesting conversation around the projects of Sacha Baron Cohen boils down to this: How has the comedy of Ali G or Borat aged? That’s what the dismal theater of “Ali G: Who Iz I?” centers on, both in plot and as setup for its elaborately empty social commentary.
The more interesting conversation about the film, directed by Cohen, is instead in how the form rather than the content, revisited now, reflects the shifts in our media appetites. In “Who Iz I?,” Cohen has dredged up Ali G, the early 2000s persona that he built his career on, a patois-inflected British hooligan whose brazen ignorance would compromise serious interview subjects on “Da Ali G Show,” Cohen’s HBO show that ran from 2003-04 in the United States.
He’s returned for a more focused mission here, but the larger conceit requires some retooling. Often the movie reorients its bits into a vertical social media feed, partly a nod to the film’s narrative, as Ali G runs around Los Angeles trying to get back into the limelight, but also perhaps in tacit acknowledgment of how much Cohen’s format has mutated in the digital age.
When Cohen created Ali G, he was part of a new dawn in comedy: performance art gone gonzo, portable camera in tow, foisting the routine onto others in the wild in bite-size segments. In the age of the algorithm and A.I. slop, these shenanigans are simply what we call the internet, with its fire hose of man-on-the-street interviews, sketches and pranks, rage-bait debates and altercations.
Cohen’s once biting cringe comedy does not ring the same in this ecosystem, and even Ali G knows it; hence the TikTok interludes that include consuming a large amount of food for a mukbang video with a professor and A.S.M.R. whispers with an Army general. The bits here are lumbering, the format desperate.
Of course, not every viral video harbors the aims of Cohen, whose personas were ultimately meant to reveal something about society, its ironies and its isms. As inappropriate as Ali G may now be, that is ostensibly exactly why he is back, his uncouth and uncensored personality a foil to the polarized extremes of Trump’s America.
The actual result is deadened, both in comedy and in political revelation. Like many a comedian, Cohen spends much of the first half reaching for that low-hanging fruit: the woke mob. There are jokes about cultural appropriation ripped out of 2015 and undergirding the plot around Ali G’s flailing comeback. Cohen would claim that the dated jokes are the point: This is how Americans have has been conditioned to see one another.
The movie culminates in a few awkwardly overwrought setups involving men on the fringe — a South African ex-arms manufacturer, a Texas Republican official and George Santos, the disgraced former congressman — and some grand epiphany that reinforces the film’s eye-rolling opening title card that quotes Voltaire. In short: the daily and devolving circus of division and hate in the United States has been dangerously normalized, politically and culturally.
But there’s no need for some clown infiltrator to show us a naked reality that has pounded our brains daily for years. Like the tired bits Cohen is doing here, all we have to do is open up our phones to see it.
Ali G: Who Iz I? Rated R for crude content, graphic nudity, language and drug use. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Prime Video.
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