Review as Sacha Baron Cohen's controversial alter-ego returns to the big screen

It is, frankly, the comeback nobody asked for. But the return of Ali G is surprisingly more relevant than you might expect. 

Even 20 years ago, the character was deemed problematic for appropriating and ridiculing black tropes. Now, with culture war battle lines even more entrenched, Sacha Baron Cohen confronts those accusations head-on.

In Who Iz I?, he exposes his own shaky, hypocritical justifications about his alter-ego before sending Ali to an expert in African-American heritage. She tells him he must educate himself on what’s behind the culture he adopts as costume. It would, the character acknowledges, be one of the most challenging things he would ever have to do. So he decides not to bother.

Meanwhile, the censorious liberal left is represented by a character from Baron Cohen’s 2018 Showtime show Who Is America?, the virtue-signalling Dr Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, who sets himself up as knowing more about the black community than the community itself. ‘I have a better dream,’ he says.

His one mission is to take down Ali G, whitesplaining to people worried about affordable housing that cultural appropriation is the biggest issue they face. Still, he recruits willing leftist lieutenants to join him in the good fight alongside an unpaid African intern ‘liberated’ from his homeland.

On the other side, Baron Cohen also revives Who Is America? character Erran Morad, an Israeli anti-terrorism expert who was definitely not in Mossad, to train a militia of Maga-supporting ‘patriots’ who want to defend their plot of dirt against the immigrants they so fear.

Who Iz I? opens with the Voltaire quote: ‘Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’ And while that clearly speaks to the Trumpian political climate, it might be seen as rather pretentious for a movie that features a weapon that fires bullets from a fake butt if a prosthetic penis is pumped vigorously enough.

But what Sacha Baron Cohen gets people to do because they believe patently absurd lies that fit their preconceived ideas of the world is genuinely jaw-dropping. 

Film-makers repeatedly remind us the people taking part are not in on it, so shocking is what they will do in the name of a cause they’ve been told to believe, not questioning the sanity of it, let alone the morality. This is a psychological experiment with frequently horrific consequences… but plenty of dick jokes.

The paranoid redneck Maga supporters are the easiest targets but Baron Cohen claims some notable scalps including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, ex-congressman George Santos, and Rachel Dolezal/Nkechi Amare Diallo, the activist who presented herself as black despite being ethnically white.

Baron Cohen has balls of steel to pull this off, and is backed by the equally fearless Morgana Robinson, a stellar addition to the film as Ali G’s Me Julie. The personal storyline is whether, 20 years after his heyday, Ali should finally give up his dreams of living the shallow wannabe gangsta life and settle down in Staines with his childhood sweetheart, now pregnant with their first child. 

Everything is accompanied by dumb, puerile humour, from a general trying to conduct a serious interview on an ASMR podcast to visual gags parodying giant padded jackets or plane passengers’ ostentatious neck-pillows.

The obsession with smutty sex jokes can be a little off-putting, and often the sketch nature of some of the ‘gotcha’ hoaxes is at odds with the greater story, with the film sometimes straining to cover too many comedic bases. But they are funny moments that will go gangbusters when clipped for social media.

And the low comedy comes in service of audacious stunts that expose terrifying truths about American society - moments that can be ranked up there with Chris Morris at his finest. 

• Ali G: Who Iz I? is in cinemas this weekend only

Review date: 22 Oct 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett