Ali G: Who Iz I? Review

Ali G: Who Iz I? is on Prime Video now, and maybe in a theater near you, though probably not for much longer.

Once the genesis of Sacha Baron Cohen’s mockumentary career, white Rude Boy poseur Ali G now marks its whimper of an ending. Released on Prime Video just five days after its theatrical release, the actor’s directorial debut Ali G: Who Iz I? barely holds together as either cinema or practical joke — let alone where the two have met in the past, by way of his exceptionally enduring Borat. His efforts this time feel especially feeble, landing somewhere in the realm of an unfocused Matt Walsh documentary, where the result isn’t so much laughter, or even provocation, but puzzled annoyance. Fifteen minutes in, one of his unsuspecting targets sums it up succinctly when shown a presentation meant to offend her: “I don’t care.”

Cohen’s latest borrows characters from both HBO’s Da Ali G show as well as his Showtime series Who Is America? in an attempt to weave a political portrait of the modern United States, all wrapped in a flimsy narrative. Like the riotous Borat sequel Subsequent Moviefilm, Who Iz I? is nominally about the wannabe British Rastafari facing fatherhood, when he learns that his longtime girlfriend Julie (Morgana Robinson, taking over for Kellie Bright from the narrative comedy Ali G Indahouse) is pregnant with their child. An attempt to get a third season of his HBO interview series off the ground finds him flying across the pond to LA, where his arrival catches the attention of another Cohen character, Showtime’s Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, an outdated send-up of liberal academia who hopes to nail him for “cultural appropriation,” despite speaking over people himself.

Along the way, both characters interact with various bystanders in Cohen’s signature prankish style, but his instigations prove limp. There just doesn’t seem to be enough footage to string together a film of everyday subjects responding with outrage, indignation, or even the strained politeness underlying the original Borat from 2006. Two decades later, everyone seems bored by this commonplace, microcelebrity tomfoolery, whether or not they recognize the man behind the makeup. They mostly don’t, though at least one of them, involved in the movie’s confoundingly scattered climax, appears to have gone along with it for the daily rate. Perhaps this is why Cohen feels the need for heavy-handed explanations, in the movie’s opening and closing, of how his mockumentary format works.

The caricatures Cohen portrays feel tame in comparison to a world increasingly divided by political fissures, though given how much the movie’s first half is concerned with “cancel culture” and “DEI” — things even the U.S. government uses as phantom boogeyman — the movie’s mission statement is too askew to root for in the first place. While it does eventually set its sights on those in power, it opts for low-hanging fruit in the form of penile humor that its subjects mostly ignore, forcing Cohen to cut awkwardly around non-reactions.

However, setting aside the movie’s asymmetrical political bent doesn’t yield much of interest to begin with, because Who Iz I? is really only about America on the surface. What it’s really about is Cohen, or rather Ali G, in a way that threatens to be interesting for the briefest moment. Will the character wrestle with his own irrelevance when he fails to secure airtime? Not so fast! Instead, the hamstrung plot grows increasingly obsessed with Dr. Nira’s attempts to find dirt on Ali on make him persona non grata, as though wayward online criticisms of Cohen’s shtick had gotten under his skin and he were trying to pre-empt objections to the movie through Cohen-on-Cohen discourse. If anyone was trying to silence Cohen’s comedy, they’ve clearly been unsuccessful, since he managed to make this movie — though its failures are a product of its own inability to strike while the iron is hot. A three second Cameo from Rachel Dolezal isn’t going to cut it in 2026.

This is largely in line with the film’s M.O. Few gags or targets stick around long enough to let the absurdities land. The Ali G character isn’t so much deployed to prod at people’s politics as he is to be a clownish presence waving his arms for attention, while Cohen also portrays an exaggerated mishmash of what he pictures his critics are like, or what they believe. At the very least, this yields a revealing portrait of artistic insecurity, if an unintentional one. Who Iz I? is a film that takes no risks and has nothing to say, all in service of misguided self-preservation, as Cohen fails to read the tea leaves of a culture that has, for better or worse, long left him behind.