Jagshemash! Of course Borat is back in 2020, because nothing can surprise us these days. Sacha Baron Cohen will be reprising his role from the 2006 comedy in a sequel on Amazon Prime, available October 23.
The film, officially titled Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm, picks back up with Cohen as Kazakh journalist Borat, who returns to America with his daughter hoping to “gift her to someone close to the throne.” (Read: someone in Donald Trump's White House.)
People got wind that Cohen was filming the sequel over the summer after he (dressed in a fake beard and overalls) appeared at a far-right militia group's rally in Olympia, Washington, and convinced the crowd to sing a racist song with him. Soon after, in July, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani revealed that Cohen had pulled another prank and crashed his interview at the Mark Hotel in New York City, wearing “a pink bikini, with lace, underneath a translucent mesh top.”
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The trailer for Borat 2 has all the antics we come to expect from the wild, larger-than-life character. Some prominent gags have him showing up to a pregnancy crisis centre with a daughter whom he accidentally "put a baby in" (she swallowed a baby toy) and them to remove it, crashing a Pence rally in a crowd of gun-slinging Americans dressed as Donald Trump, and jokes about "fisting." It also comes on the heels of Cohen's Showtime Who Is America series, which felt like an extension of the Borat format. But in the context of 2020 America, does it even work?
Fourteen years ago, extremists did not have as large of a platform to express their racist views as President Trump has given them. The harsh realities of hatred the original Borat laid bare were shocking to most audiences. In Trump's America, all bets are off. It's unlikely that we'll be seeing anything more over-the-top or messed up than what we've experienced in the last year, let alone the last four. In the midst of an ongoing pandemic, and a toxic presidential election, can anything shock us anymore?
Watch the trailer for Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm, out on October 23 on Amazon Prime.