There's a specific melancholy to watching a great comic character outlive the conditions that made him great. Ali G worked in the early 2000s because the gap between his performed ignorance and his targets' real ignorance was genuinely shocking — you weren't sure who was stupider. That productive uncertainty is harder to sustain now, when everyone knows Sacha Baron Cohen, when the media ecosystem is so fragmented that the hoax format has been replicated to exhaustion, and when the film has to pause three times to explain who is and isn't in on the joke. The setup is thin but functional: Ali is washed up, broke, and morally opposed to his pregnant partner Julie's OnlyFans plans. A fax machine in a Staines pawn shop delivers an HBO offer and the whole apparatus cranks back into motion — Ali and Julie (Morgana Robinson) head to America, the hoaxes begin, and the film's actual fictional villain, the new character Dr Nira Cain-N'Degrocello, a grotesquely supercilious white liberal anti-appropriation crusader, is deployed to try to take Ali down. It's the most self-conscious thing Baron Cohen has attempted: a character designed explicitly to pre-empt and mock accusations of racism, an authorial thumb on the scale that announces its own defense before the prosecution has spoken. The Erran Morad subplot — the sinister Mossad/IDF officer turned US security consultant, carried over from Who Is America? — is grafted onto the climax, wherein credulous Republicans are convinced that Ali is a Mexican terrorist whose unborn child must be prevented from achieving US citizenship. This is the film's sharpest material and also its most depressingly easy. The targets walk into it. Baron Cohen doesn't land the kind of slow-build devastation he achieved with Rudy Giuliani in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm; the big names here don't yield a defining moment. You'll know the best bits will be on TikTok within a week, and the film seems to know it too. The Nira Cain-N'Degrocello character is where the film gets genuinely interesting and genuinely uncomfortable at the same time. She's a sharp creation — the supercilious progressive who makes anti-racism about her own performance — but she also functions as a kind of inoculation, an argument that Baron Cohen can't be racist because look, here's a character that mocks people who would call him racist. The circularity is too neat, and it doesn't actually resolve the underlying question of whether Ali G's whole apparatus — the performed blaccent, the mimicry — has aged out of the cultural permission structure that once (arguably) legitimized it. The film wants to have this argument and also win it, and it doesn't quite manage either. The comparison to David Brent and Alan Partridge's film outings is apt and damning. Those characters could age badly in dramatically useful ways — their delusion and irrelevance became the subject matter. Ali G's irrelevance is dramatically inert. The On-the-Buses domestic comedy with Julie is tired, the energy between Ali's suburban delusion and American credulity feels like a rerun, and the film's best instinct — that maybe the hoax format itself needs reinvention — goes unacted on. The Tim Westwood omission is the most telling gap: the one figure whose real-world trajectory most directly asks the question the film keeps circling is simply not mentioned. When a film avoids its own most interesting thread, you notice.
