Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is the shortest title for this sequel to the original Borat film. Apparently – and this could be a meta joke – the original tile was going to be Borat: Gift of Pornographic Monkey to Vice Premiere Mikhael Pence to Make Benefit Recently Diminished Nation of Kazakhstan. But, like a lot of the content of this new film, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s staged.

So this new film follows Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) as he returns to America to offer a gift to VP Pence in order to get in with Trump (clearly a great man). He is joined by his daughter played by Maria Bakalova doing a pretty good Borat accent. In reality, she needs to be the face in some of the film’s sequences because Borat/Cohen is too easily recognized (and Cohen often dons a disguise on top of his existing disguise to hide his identity).

So it’s a decent premise and excuse for a plot that connects the interviews/sequences/practical jokes together. These father/daughter scenes tend to be amusing but largely exists as connective tissue and setups for the interviews/sequences.

These sequences can be weird since sometimes Cohen is in the gray-suited Borat costume and it’s unclear if they (the folk) are in on the joke or not. And, as usual, some of this involves people saying horrible things or not blinking when Borat says them. But they are doing so clearly on camera and they must have signed waivers allowing their likeness to be used unblurred. So how much is real?

To be honest, I was never a big fan of Borat in general. Not because he says outrageously racist and sexist things (I get the jokes and sometimes they are funny) but because I’m just not a big fan of gotcha-type practical jokes. When Borat hassles working stiffs in the service industry, I’m not sure if he’s trying to convey how horrible these people are or not. Because, having worked in retail myself, sometimes you just have to roll with the crazy customers because that’s your job. So I don’t see the entertainment or informational value of making a working stiff’s day worse.

Anyhow, he does get close to some hard core right wingers and powerful folk but I’m not sure how real those scenes are. Maybe 100% but there’s so many shots of Borat just being weird around them that I think they have to be in on the joke (I mean, there’s a camera crew filming this right?). Which then leads me to wonder if they believe the stuff they are saying or if they are playing along. Not that some of these hard core types don’t say some pretty wild stuff on camera with real journalists already.

So, between my suspicion and my distaste for harassing average workers, I’m kind of set up to not really enjoy the film. It was, at least, occasionally laugh out loud funny but it wore out its welcome pretty quickly. So I’m mixed on the flick, but take that for what it’s worth from someone who found the original amusing but over-rated.

Score: 72