by Richard Smith

Created on: November 10, 2008   Last Updated: December 10, 2008

The other night I was at a loose end and so decided to give this film a second chance. Some comedies can be better the second time round as you get to see jokes or nuances that you missed the first time around when you were focusing maybe on the plot too much or were watching a film that you had high expectations of only to be disappointed. For me comedies like Caddyshack and The Blues Brothers both fit into this category, films that were much better the second and third time around and I hoped that Borat would maybe fall into this category however unfortunately it did not and so the DVD is likely to be collecting dust for the foreseeable future in the FDH house.

For those who have been making like Osama and living in a cave for the past few years Borat is the comic creation of Sacha Baron Cohen who also bought us Ali G and Bruno the camp Austrian fashion reporter. Borat is from Kazakhstan and was originally a TV character who appeared in a number of sketches visiting the United States in order to find out about the culture of the country and to report back to his people, as a short sketch it relies on people believing totally in his character and then he uses this trust to push the boundaries either to shock with his own antics or to get them to say things on camera that would shock the viewer, in particular Borat has strong anti Semitic views (the inside joke being Cohen own faith is Jewish) and one of his best known sketches was the time he sang an anti Jewish song to a group of redneck cowboys in a country and western bar and got them to enthusiastically join in with the chorus.

The film follows the same format, it opens with his showing the camera team around his village in Kazakhstan (actually filmed in a Romanian village) with many of the jokes borrowed from his TV show, and then he learns that along with his producer Azamat Bagatov, played by Ken Davitian, he is off to America to send reports back to his country. While in New York he sees Pamela Anderson on TV in her Baywatch role and falls instantly in love and tricks Azamat to agree to travel across America to California to discover the real America. From that point the film takes on a comedy road trip style with lots of stop offs along the way for Borat to interview unsuspecting middle America.

In my opinion this film fails to transfer the qualities of the small screen sketches featuring Borat into a feature film package. On the plus side the film does have a wider range of comedy genres to it, there

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