Time Out says
Plenty to laugh at, then, and hard. But like ‘Ali G Indahouse’, the film struggles to adapt an essentially televisual character to the big screen. Both Ali and Borat are terrifically conceived provocateurs capable of coaxing all sorts of damning concessions from the unwitting, but they’re pretty thin as characters in their own right. The potential for satire, meanwhile, is blunted by the narrative demands of a feature, which muddy the boundaries between candid-camera revelations and scripted crassness. For every genuine shocker – a rodeo crowd cheering Borat’s exhortation that ‘George Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq’ – there are several fish-in-a-barrel moments of feminist-baiting, poo jokes and queasily tongue-in-cheek anti-Semitism. Still, you can’t help but relish the chutzpah of such spectacular obscenities as the ‘running of the Jew’, a Pamplona-style carnival in Borat’s village that can only be descibed as jaw-dropping.
Release Details
- Rated:15
- Release date:Thursday 2 November 2006
- Duration:82 mins
Cast and crew
- Director:Larry Charles
- Screenwriter:Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Dan Mazer
- Cast:
- Sacha Baron Cohen
- Kevin Davitian
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