Arriving less than two weeks before the 2020 presidential election in the United States, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is perhaps the final piece of evidence that the Trump years have been so profane as to be beyond satire. Sacha Baron Cohen returns as Borat, the Kazakh television reporter, this time assigned by the country’s autocratic leader to deliver a gift of appreciation to Vice President Mike Pence. In 2006’s brilliantly deranged Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Cohen’s ruse exposed pockets of intolerance and misogyny that represented the worst of America. These days, those pockets have been handed social-media megaphones and real political power. And so there’s not much point in having Cohen don a Ku Klux Klan robe at the Conservative Political Action Conference, considering that during a public Supreme Court confirmation hearing just before the film’s release, Senator Lindsey Graham blithely referred to the “good old days of segregation.” As a result, all the political barbs feel sad, rather than sharp—including the gotcha, on-camera gags involving Pence and Rudy Giuliani. (The best bit isn’t topical at all, but a sequence in which Borat takes a job as a barber and insists on showing his first customer every single snip of hair.) The dispiriting truth is that Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’s staged pranks can’t compete with our awful reality. The movie is trying to expose people who have already been walking around the past four years with their pants down.
