Sacha Baron Cohen must have depleted the water supply of approximately 17 townships to present us with all of the following: AI-generated Hitler and Greta Thunberg rapping about blowjobs; AI-generated Biggie Smalls making out with AI-generated Grandma Cohen with massive breasts; and AI-generated Black Jesus welcoming Ali G as a saint after crucifixion by the masses. Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, on the architecture of AI systems, explain a troubling reality, that this technology “consume[s] enormous amounts of energy. Yet the material details of those costs remain vague in the social imagination.” They go on to cite a Greenpeace report, which found that “one of the single biggest obstacles to sector transparency is Amazon Web Services (AWS).” Fitting, then, that the distributor of Ali G: Who Iz I? is in the same family.
The social imagination is also murky on the details of what Cohen is attempting to do with this revival film. The original Channel 4/HBO series was certainly a product of the early aughts, replete with linguistic and cultural appropriation that he does, to be fair, tackle head-on in this reunion — Ali G acknowledges the systemic reckoning amplified by COVID and infuses the narrative with montages of TikTok influencers and other public figures comically issuing statements about this fictitious character’s racially misguided history. Had this thread been unraveled further, perhaps Who Iz I? could have achieved something worthwhile, but instead we’re given other threads. Too many threads.
The thread that sinks this film is the Bond-like villain, also portrayed by Cohen in heavy makeup and prosthetics, who attempts to thwart Ali G’s comeback. This character is a professor of ethnomusicology, specializing in African culture, and his presence serves to mock virtue signaling, DEI initiatives, and a variety of cancel-culture inflections, which also leads to a bloated narrative, confused vision, and cheapened effect. While this critic wouldn’t go to bat for Ari Aster’s Eddington, that film at least did a decent job at lampooning social divisions and embellished fears amid the pandemic’s world-shattering onslaught — a platoon of “Antifa” warriors descends on a small town in the middle of the night, a Kyle Rittenhouse-esque teen steps in heroically, and so on. All ideological vices are thrown under the guillotine.
For Ali G, however, much of the comedy stems from a cringeworthy anti-woke tendency, and in the end we are asked to see a silver lining in his decision to step away from the opportunity to have his own alt-right commentary show, because he comes to the realization that they are asking him to exploit his persona for hate, whereas he views his own persona as one of “spreading the love.” If the theme of Ali G navigating his own ego amidst a post-BLM society had been kept consistent, without the addition of other Cohen personas, AI slop, and an oscillation between “candid” scenarios and “dramatic” storytelling, this may have just worked for a 2026 revival of the character.
Cohen opts, rather, to give us a product that feels aesthetically like an extended episode of Pawn Stars, politically like an Angel Studios production, and comedically like a post-2010 Eminem music video. The blunt edge and shock value of his earlier work is rendered undeniably diluted when we get moments like Cohen breaking character to say directly into the camera, “MAH WIFE… love that movie. Still holds up,” as well as sporadic intrusions of captioning that reads “Reminder, they are not in on this” when supposedly “non-actors” are brought into an absurd scheme. It’s difficult to believe when the scenarios are as overblown and dramatized as they are here, not to mention the fact that the filmmaker (yes, singular, since Cohen took on most of the behind-the-camera roles himself) feels desperate enough to explicitly reiterate this to us beyond just the opening credits.
So where does that leave us? Well, this writer’s experience of the film came in a sparsely-attended press screening, free tallboy of beer in hand, taking in footage of the real George Santos and some random Republican guest compete to see who can toss the most immigrant-coded dolls/action figures into a fake gas chamber, as well as Cohen pitching a “gender-reversal” program to a classroom of “non-actor” parents from a school district, at one point showing them AI images of a young boy who chose to be surgically implanted with “Kim Kardashian ass” and a young girl who chose the “Orlando Bloom’s member” treatment. Cue AI image of a preteen girl with a massive schlong poking through her sweatpants. Thank god for that free beer. Viewers won’t be so lucky.
DIRECTOR: Sacha Baron Cohen; CAST: Sacha Baron Cohen, Morgana Robinson, C. Stewart Rodeheaver; DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon MGM Studios; IN THEATERS: October 23; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 28 min.
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