Of all the crimes that Jeff Bezos and Amazon have committed across the past two decades – killing the high-street, dodging hundreds of millions of pounds in corporation tax every year, cancelling the hit TV show Patriot– putting two minutes of adverts before Ali G: Who Iz I? on Prime Video might be their most brazen.
I went into this film knowing it wouldn’t be good. In fact, I went in knowing it would probably be actively bad. But I had to know. I just had to know. When I was younger I was a big fan of Ali G, and Borat, and once or twice a year I still do find myself sat watching clips on YouTube of the old shows, usually with a beer in my hand. Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy is stupid, and regularly mean-spirited, but it got the job done within the era in which it existed. Relative to today’s yardstick of The Whitehouse Tweeting Videos of Halo Memes, the 90’s and early 00’s seem incredibly self-serious, and so it makes sense that someone who poked fun at that sincerity via absurd ignorance was able to emerge in that period (and the fact that Cohen went to Cambridge didn’t hurt). But in 2026, where everyone is poking fun at everything, constantly, everywhere, all the time, is there room for someone like Ali G? Does that style of comedy make sense in a world where Netanyahu is interviewed by The Nelk Boys? Does a white man saying “is it cos I iz black” hold up in a time where your dad has Charlie Kirk memes saved on his phone? I watched the new Ali G film to find out, and the answer is a complicated: no, not really.
The basic premise of Ali G: Who Iz I? is this: Ali G has ran out of money from his previous successes in the 2000’s, his girlfriend Julie is pregnant and wants to start an OnlyFans to live her dream (“Yo yo yo, OnlyFans is well disprespectfulist to women, ain’t gon let my bitch be on that”), so Ali is forced to sell some of his prized possessions to raise cash. During his trip to the pawn shop, an old fax machine is plugged in, and Ali receives a message from HBO, offering a few million pounds for him to produce the next season of his show. Predictably, Ali doesn’t realise that the fax is from 2004, so when he and Julie set off to America to begin mansion-hunting and prepping for the show, they run into financial issues, leading to Ali beginning a smaller career on TikTok, making ASMR with retired generals and the like. Meanwhile, a second character played by Cohen, Dr. Nira Cain-N'Degeocello, plots against Ali, citing his appropriation of black culture as the ultimate crime, and going to extreme lengths to prove that he is genetically white. Antics ensue, including a scene where the left-wing professor Dr Cain has sex with an intoxicated Ali so as not to break cover, and a final confrontation in which Cain convinces real-life Republican politician Michael Aboud to kidnap and (attempt to) murder Ali G’s newborn baby, under the pretence that Ali is a South American drug lord. Fortunately, the baby is just a very lifelike robot.
The parts of this film that work are the parts which are borrowed more or less directly from the successes of Borat 2 and the spin-off TV show Who Is America?, in which Cohen tricks the often powerful, usually wealthy, and always moronic people of America into exposing their true nature by posing as a friend to their cause. When Who Is America? was released, it had been a while since Cohen’s last foray into the faux-documentary world, and it was unclear how it would work out. But upon airing, the sheer mania of the world that Cohen was exposing, and the pure celebrity of those involved, meant that it was immediately a hit. As it turned out, hanging around with right wingers, encouraging their darker instincts, led to incredibly entertaining viewing, and absolutely unbelievable television. And so, it makes sense that Who Iz I? is at its best when Cohen leans into this same formula, recruiting right wingers into a fake Mossad training exercise where they learn to fire an asshole-mounted gun by jerking off a fake penis, or when it convinces Newt Gingrich to record a talking head condemning Ali G as the head of a criminal gang.
Unfortunately, Cohen is unwilling to embrace the reality of what he is best at, and who he is best at tricking, instead doing his level best to try and produce a somewhat politically balanced film. The problem with this, it seems, is that Cohen was unable to find anyone left leaning who he could trick into doing or saying anything even remotely as insane as what the Trump guys were doing and saying. And I have to say that I am surprised! Left wing people do say bizarre things sometimes too, I was on Twitter for fifteen years, I’ve seen it. But in any case, Cohen can’t find them, so instead he’s left in the position where he has to play the role of the crazy leftie who gets angry about cultural appropriation in 2026. Dr Nira Cain-N'Degeocello is the character that Cohen wishes he had met organically, a social justice warrior who is himself racist, and vicious, without a hint of self-awareness. But the only thing he can think to do with this character is to put him in front of normal people and hope that the audience laughs along as the normal people get angry at him. There’s no truth to the humour, and in a world where the snowflake label has all but melted amongst anyone living in reality, it doesn’t really make any sense.
For example, this is very funny.
Now I’m not going to pretend that these scenes don’t have their own little moments of inspiration. Cohen is a comedian who is swinging constantly, and in this film, there are so many missed swings that it’s easy to not appreciate the homeruns. But it all feels a bit limp-dicked when you compare the ‘annoying lib’ material to something like Ali’s pivot to right-wing grifting in act three, where he hosts his first episode of ‘The Free Speech Show’.
In a segment that is genuinely alarming, Ali/Cohen brings out an aspiring ICE agent and former US Representative George Santos, who he then has race to collect as many undesirables (woke judges, protestors, illegal immigrant babies) as possible, storing them in a shower block with a button that releases Zyklon B. After it ends, and Santos loses, he cheerfully quips “should have grabbed more babies”.
Cohen touches on something in the American psyche here, very briefly. This willingness to do almost anything on camera, just as long as you are, definitely, on camera. A thirst for fame and relevance that, when intertwined with the bloodthirsty racism of the MAGA movement, transforms real people into these glamourless caricatures of evil, stood around on brightly lit TV sets modelled off of death camps, wearing the same old ugly clothes that’ve migrated over from their desk jobs - it’s almost enough to make you miss the Hugo Boss. But then the moment passes, all too quickly. And it’s never interrogated further, and George Santos will probably watch it with his friends and laugh at the whole situation. Because Cohen refuses to really put his foot down and commit to the idea.
Ali G Indahouse (2002)
I suppose ultimately my problem with Ali G: Who Iz I? is that we don’t get either of the two things that Ali G promises as a concept: we don’t get a tongue in cheek observation of contrasts between the two worlds of British existence, the upper class and the underclass (perfectly executed in Ali G: Indahouse), nor do we get to enjoy the resulting absurdity of someone with such a fragile understanding of even his own existence trying to navigate the wholly unique landscape of the United States (which is more or less the premise of Borat). Instead, we get a garbled mess of visual messages that aren’t quite real messages, with a loose narrative laid over the top that serves more as a pretence for the film to be a film than it does to tell any kind of story.
Apparently Sacha Baron Cohen is quite surprised that Who Iz I? didn’t do well at the box office, and I think that fact only serves as further evidence for how out of touch he is with reality. In a time where people get their laughs in thirty second bursts, for free, all day every day, through TikTok and Instagram reels, he’s surprised that no one turned up and paid a tenner to watch a twenty-fiver-year old character return to screens in what I would only describe in the very loosest of ways as ‘a comedy’. Who Iz I? is a comedy in the same way that Trump’s speeches are situational comedy. When you find yourself pointing your camera at a reality this stupid, and you still somehow manage to make it boring to watch, maybe it’s time to hang up the prosthetics.
