Ali G: Who Iz I?

Comments and reviews

• 

  NWS staff review.

  Oct 30, 2026

  2/10

  Right, so I went into this one properly hyped. I grew up quoting Ali G at school, did the whole "is it cos I is black" thing in the lunch queue until a teacher told me to pack it in, and I watched the old show on DVD more times than I'd admit to. When I heard Sacha Baron Cohen was bringing him back, and directing it himself, I was in. Booked the night off. Snacks. The lot. And... yeah. Mixed bag. Leaning on the disappointing side, if I'm honest. The setup is actually decent. Ali's been doing nothing for twenty years (fair enough, same), Julie turns out to be eight months pregnant, and he can't keep a job or even win a rap battle against some local schoolkids, which is a genuinely funny bit. So he digs out an old HBO offer for a new season, flies to America with Julie, and finds out the offer expired about two decades ago. Classic Ali. So he just makes the show anyway and streams it on TikTok, doing interviews mixed with ASMR, mukbang and clothing hauls. I laughed at that idea. An old man in a tracksuit whispering into a microphone while eating, it's a good joke about where "content" has gone. The trouble is the movie doesn't really commit to what made Ali G work in the first place, which was the interviews. Him sat across from some important person asking the dumbest question in the world with a totally straight face. There's a bit of that here, with real political figures who clearly don't know what they've signed up for, and those moments are the best stuff in the film. But there's not nearly enough. Loads of the runtime is acted scenes, and because they're shot the same way as the "real" bits, half the time I couldn't tell what was a setup and what was a genuine ambush. That killed it for me a bit. The fun of these films is the "no way that's real" feeling. If you can't tell, the gasp never comes. Then it gets crowded. Cohen drags in his other characters too. Dr. Nira Cain-N'Degeocello, the leftist professor from Who Is America?, turns up accusing Ali of cultural appropriation and rallying activists against him. Erran Morad the Israeli self-defence guy is back as well. On paper, fine, sort of an Avengers for idiots. In practice every time someone else pops up you get yanked out of Ali's story, and the story's thin enough already. There's also a running thing where Ali misreads a comment online and decides ASAP Rocky is his dad. I chuckled once. Then it kept going. It also does that trendy thing where the film keeps winking at itself, like it's making fun of the very idea of a reboot. Felt like it couldn't decide if it was a comeback, a parody of a comeback, or a Borat sequel wearing a yellow tracksuit. Pick one, mate. Now, the crude stuff. It is extremely crude. Sex jokes, drug jokes, things designed purely to offend. If you've seen the other films you know the deal, but this one is heavy on it and a fair amount of it is just loud instead of clever. Not one to put on with your nan. Or your teenager, really. On the whole "is it woke" thing, since that's what people on here care about: honestly no, I don't think it is. The cultural appropriation crowd are the butt of the joke, not the heroes. The professor character is there to be laughed at. There's a political angle running through it, and some viewers will find it preachy depending on which way they lean, because Cohen does like pointing his camera at people he thinks are dumb and it's not always subtle who he's pointing at. But it doesn't push any message at me in the way these lists usually mean. Nobody gets lectured. It's just a bloke being an idiot on purpose and letting other people be idiots for real. I didn't spot anything that would count as one of the usual red flags. Performances? Cohen is still committed, I'll give him that, the man has no shame and that's his superpower. The bit where he's back home, washed up and losing to children, is the strongest stretch of the whole thing because it's actually about Ali. Once it flies to America it starts trying to be about everything at once. I'll say the trailers were better than the film. All the best bits were in the trailer and I'd seen them. That always stings. Would I tell a mate to watch it? If you're a hardcore Ali G fan, yeah, watch it once, you'll get maybe five or six proper laughs and a couple of "how did he get away with that" moments. If you're new to him, go watch the original series instead, it's miles better. This one's an hour and a half that feels longer, and I'm a bit gutted about that because I really wanted it to be good. Respek to the effort. Not so much to the result.