Ali G Is Back After 20 Years, and Sacha Baron Cohen Filmed the Whole Thing in Secret

Booyakasha. I never thought I would type that word in 2026, but Ali G: Who Iz I? is in cinemas this weekend and I am oddly thrilled about it. Sacha Baron Cohen directed, wrote and produced it, which makes it his first feature behind the camera, and he shot the whole thing in secret the way he did Borat and Who Is America?

The setup is simple. Ali G finds out his partner Julie is pregnant, panics in the way only Ali G can, and heads to America, where he runs into people who end up threatening him and the baby. Amazon MGM is releasing it, and from the trailer it looks like the usual mix of staged story and real people being ambushed by a man in a yellow tracksuit who should not still be funny but somehow is.

The question for me is whether the character works in a world that has already had Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Borat aged into something sharper and angrier. Ali G was always softer and sillier, and that might be exactly what people want right now. Reviews were thin when I wrote this, so I am going in blind on Saturday. If you have seen it, tell me whether it holds up or whether it should have stayed in the early 2000s.