YMMV / Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

• Alternate Character Interpretation: The dad at the ball who states Tutar is "worth about $500" and gets chastised by his daughter is clearly meant to look sleazy at best and like a potential criminal at worst (especially given the movie's general theme of Dirty Old Men, what with Jeffrey Epstein's cameo as well as Borat trying to marry Tutar to someone in Trump's inner circle), but right before the scene cuts away from him, he can clearly be heard telling his daughter "What? It's all a-". This, when combined with testimony from some of the people actually at the event (that indicate that they thought they were extras for a comedy movie rather than being filmed for Borat) seems to indicate that he may have just been purposefully improvising himself as a sleazy character thinking he was in a movie, only for the mockumentary to make his response look genuine.
• Award Snub: Given the film won Picture and Sacha Baron Cohen won Actor on the comedy side at the Golden Globes, several fans were saddened to see Maria Bakalova losing Actress, with surprise winner Rosamund Pike even singling out Bakalova in her speech. With all that said, she did go on to get an Oscar nomination for Supporting Actress.
• Awesome Animation: Despite being restricted to just 2 clips, each only a few seconds long, and being very crass to boot, the Disneyesque Melania movie has beautiful animation courtesy of Titmouse highly reminiscent of the Disney movies they are parodying, specifically Cinderella, especially given that the style of animation has been all but extinct in mainstream American feature films for a while now.
• Contested Sequel: Some fans found the film to be a significant step down from the first Borat, with the sequel mostly rehashing the original's gags while overusing gross-out humour and being much more one-sided with its targets. Others found Subsequent Moviefilm to be an Even Better Sequel for its more progressive message and the Character Development of Borat and Tutar, as well as having less of a Random Events Plot than the original.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Borat refers to an evil man who took over the USA... Barack Obama. And the champion who made the US great, Donald Trump. Depending on how you see this, this statement from Borat is either hilarious or horrific. He also highlights other black leaders elected in Obama's wake... namely white Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, showing the infamous picture of him wearing blackface.
  • Borat gets his idea of marrying off the teenaged Tutar to a member of Trump's inner circle when he sees a broadcast showing archive footage of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein commenting on women at a party.
  • Tutar swallows a figurine of a baby, so Borat takes her to a medical clinic... that's actually a crisis pregnancy center.^note a crisis pregnancy center is a pro-life organization which provides pregnancy care and support to struggling pregnant women with a view towards persuading them to not seek an abortion The counsellor's reaction to Borat's request to extract the "baby" that he - her own father - had put in her is a sight to behold.
  • The Disneyesque animated scene of Donald Trump courting Melania. First he has a visible erection, then he literally grabs her by the pussy. Then they waltz, with Trump still clutching Melania's crotch.
  • When Borat infiltrates Pence's meeting at CPAC, how he does he attempt to blend in with the Republicans before he dons his Trump disguise? By dressing up as a Klansman.
  • When Tutar abandons Borat, he's heartbroken and contemplates suicide... by going to a synagogue and waiting for the next mass shooting, dressed in a Paper-Thin Disguise as a racist Jewish caricature, complete with a sack of money in one hand and a marionette wearing a "MEDIA" sign in the other. Not only that, but he's especially heartbroken when Tutar tells him that Kazakhstan's "proudest moment" - The Holocaust - didn't happen. He then gets his mojo back when he learns it was in fact real.
  • When it's revealed that COVID-19 was a plot by the Kazakhstani government to spite the Western World, with Borat being their plague rat, Borat suddenly recalls several key moments where he managed to spread his saliva, including some previously unseen moments where he went to China and ate from a wet market, and personally infected Tom Hanks (played by the man himself!).
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Jeanise, Tutar's black babysitter, and the two elderly Jewish women became famous on social media for being very kind and standing up to prejudice (both anti-semitism and misogyny).
  • Jim and Jerry were initially intended to be made the butt of a lot of jokes and to mock QAnon and other right-wing nuts, but they ultimately come across as very likable guys who take the COVID-19 Pandemic seriously, contradict Borat's misogynistic views, provide shelter for a complete stranger, and go out of their way to help him find his "daughter". Sacha Baron Cohen himself found them both to be good people who have been misled and twisted by conspiracy theories, and decided to portray them in a more sympathetic and positive light despite their beliefs.
  • Regardless of how you stand on the issue, the “counselor” at the anti-abortion center remained remarkably calm and non-judgmental despite the (from his perspective) horrifying story he was hearing about the “baby” inside of Tutar.
  • The Republican women at the conference were clearly very uncomfortable with what Tutar was talking about, but calmly explained that it might not be appropriate for public discussion and respectfully redirected her. Whether you agree or disagree with their positions on the issues they certainly conduct themselves far more appropriately than the “MAGA” crowd we saw at the rally later on.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The “Freedom Rally” with the MAGA crowd at the State Capitol becomes a lot less funny after the January 6th riot.
  • Mike Pence is made out to be a villain and an idiot when we see him at the CPAC Conference. Regardless of how one may feel about his politics, he ended up doing the right thing after he and Trump lost the election and was a very unfair target of Trump, the Jan. 6 rioters, and the MAGA crowd as a whole.
  • Three years after the film's release, a former employee of Rudy Giuliani filed a sexual misconduct lawsuit accusing him of subjecting her to cartoonish levels of sexual harassment and bullying. This led conservative political commentator Charlie Sykes to comment that her claims suggest Giuliani "really is the guy we saw in Borat".
• He Really Can Act:
  • Sacha Baron Cohen reprises the iconic character or Borat, bringing just as much comedic excellence to his many unscripted segments as he did before, as expected. What audiences may not have seen coming is Baron Cohen's handling of the occasional moments of pathos, bringing a new, parental side to Borat, showcasing more depth and likability than previously seen from everyone's favorite Affably Evil Kazakh. No wonder he won a Golden Globe for it, the second time this role has earned that accolade.
  • In a case of "She Really Can Act" Maria Bakalova was a little-known actress before playing Tutar, but upon this film's release, she was widely acclaimed as a perfect match to Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat. Her scene opposite Rudy Giuliani has been particularly acclaimed, as she had only one shot to get it right, nailing the take and resulting in the film's Signature Scene. The awards circuit agreed and gave Bakalova many nominations (Oscar, SAG, BAFTA...), some of which were victorious (such as the Critics' Choice).
• Memetic Loser: The film's infamous prank against Giuliani cemented his public status as a Dirty Old Man and was the first of a series of humiliating incidents that he's endured since the last few months of 2020.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The shot of Rudy Giuliani with his whole hand down his pants◊ has been frequently pointed out any time Giuliani himself does something newsworthy. During his legal challenges to the results of the 2020 Presidential Election, many joked that the scene was actually him looking down his pants for the alleged missing ballots.
  • Similarly, it was extremely common for comedy sites or people in general to scathingly refer to him as "Borat 2 star Rudy Giuliani" during the coverage of his many embarrassing moments and scandals since 2020.
• Moe: Tutar is rather backwards and finds herself in all sorts of compromising situations throughout the film, but in the end it's all because of her childlike naivety and she's a fundamentally sweet person.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Borat's son with wolfman syndrome, Bilak, and Kazakhstan's minister of culture, Johnny the Monkey, had previously appeared on a Saturday Night Live cold opening Borat made while promoting the first film.^note Though Johnny was played by a capuchin monkey in the sketch, rather than a chimpanzee as the film portrays.
  • The idea of a sequel to Borat was conceived as early as 2007 when Sacha Baron Cohen said he was planning to do a sequel, but it was ultimately scrapped. Then, bizarrely, an unofficial Kazakh sequel under the name My Brother, Borat began production, under the helm of prolific Kazakh film director Erkin Rakishev who, like Kazakhstan's government, strongly disliked how Borat portrayed the country. The film, which Rakishev intended to be an "image-redressing project", would have been about an American journalist who travels to Kazakhstan after watching Borat and meets Durat, Borat's mentally challenged brother and they try to find the fictional town of Kusek and would have also featured the same type of crass humour. Production began shortly after Borat's release in 2006, though no updates on the project have come out since 2010.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: In Bulgaria, the movie, as well as its sequel, did garner some interest on its own by virtue of being a parody of people from the Eastern Bloc, which was of course amplified by the role of Maria Bakalova. What really caused the movie's popularity to explode, however, was an interview with her former academy professor about her, in which he, in some very unflattering words, stated she was never his favorite and that she exploited her sexuality to be in the film. This split the viewer base in two, one half defending Bakalova and accusing the professor of sexism and Sour Grapes (some comparisons were drawn with another actor who recently commented Joaquin Phoenix's Joker, saying that "anyone can make faces"), while the other half derided Borat and similar Western comedies as kitschy and lewd.
• Signature Scene:
  • Within Canada, the quick gag in the prologue referencing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's blackface scandal quickly went viral on Twitter and Reddit, reviving the controversy that had died down from earlier in the year.
  • Borat infiltrating an anti-lockdown rally and leading the far right crowd in a performance of "The Wuhan Flu Song" is also frequently brought up. Footage of the incident had already been leaked before the film's existence was even revealed, where it was already being cited as one of the most ambitious and effective pranks of Sacha Baron Cohen's career.
  • The climactic prank on Rudy Giuliani, whom the film catches on camera tucking his hand into his pants while lying on a bed in a hotel room with an (In-Universe) underage girl, is by far the most talked about scene from the film, making headlines even before its wide release.
• Spoiled by the Format: The fact that the Rudy Giuliani scene mentioned in Signature Scene above had such huge real world legal implications meant that it was spoiled by a bunch of news shows shortly before the film's release.
• Squick:
  • Tutar's dance at the debutante ball, where she repeatedly flips up her dress, revealing that she's menstruating quite heavily.
  • Poor Johnny the Monkey's partially decomposing, chewed-up corpse inside his crate is left completely uncensored.
  • Azamat Bagatov having been turned into a chair, with his penis at the back of the seat.
  • The fact that Giuliani is "prepping" to a girl who is very obviously cosplaying (or at least copying the look of) Ivanka Trump, the daughter of his boss.
• Unexpected Character: Borat himself! Sacha Baron Cohen allegedly retired the character in 2007, citing that his media recognition was too widespread, and rarely ever brought him out afterwards except for bit appearances; he created a slew of new characters for Who Is America? for that reason. It therefore came as a shock to many people that Cohen was able to bring Borat back and make him work, through a combination of disguises, interviewing people who were still uninformed, and having an additional character (Maria Bakalova's Tutar) to interview them.