I'll join the rest of everyone in being vaguely disappointed in what was a very funny movie. To some degree, I think the problem was target choice. What elevated the televised incarnation's better moments was a sense of horror underlying the humor. It was funny that Borat got the rubes in the honky-tonk to sing about tossing Jews down wells, but it also uncovered something deeply unsettling in American society. Was the tanked chorus actually anti-semitic, or were they just going along with an odd song, proof positive that group psychology effortlessly overtakes personal preference? It transformed the moment: Instead of the vague guilt we usually feel when a performer humiliates an unsuspecting audience, there was a twist of fear that there were portions of our country that an outsider could readily uncover, but that we'd comfortably, and possibly consciously, ignored.
The movie offered few such moments. It was, instead, Jackass with an accent. Nothing wrong with that. I used to love Johnny Knoxville's crew and seeing Sasha Baron Cohen get T-bagged by a morbidly obese, naked assailant is, as one would expect, grotesquely hilarious. But the film never transcended its most basic mode: Letting predefined groups be as culturally hidebound, peculiar, and hilarious as they always are. So yes, Pentecostals speak in tongues, and yes, Southern frat boys hold impolitic views, and yes, rodeo audiences don't like hearing America insulted. It's all funny. But it's all obvious. It's precisely what we'd expect. When Borat scratched our society and find elements we'd never seen before, that was darkly hilarious, but somehow edifying, exciting, and terrifying. When he scratched our society and found precisely what we knew was here, well, it was nice to be reminded of the quirkier aspects of American life, but the laugh never transformed into a thought.
