Ali G: Who Iz I? (2026)
Ali G: Who Iz I? arrives in 2026 as the long-delayed feature resurrection of a character who first appeared on Channel 4's The 11 O'Clock Show back in 1998, before spinning off into his own series and then a cinematic outing, Ali G Indahouse, in 2002. Ali G, the fictional Staines-based white boy affecting a pantomime version of Black British youth culture, was Sacha Baron Cohen's first major creation, and for a certain slice of the late nineties and early noughties British public, he was genuinely inescapable: on T-shirts, on billboards, quoted endlessly in school corridors. The character was always a provocation as much as a joke, poking at questions of race, class and cultural appropriation with a broad, often deliberately offensive brush. Whether that provocation ever amounted to genuine satire was debated at the time, and the question has only grown more loaded in the two decades since. The film is a co-production between Baron Cohen's own Four by Two Films, Working Title (long a home for a certain flavour of British comedy with transatlantic ambitions) and Amazon MGM Studios, suggesting that whatever theatrical plans may once have existed quietly gave way to a streaming-first release.
Baron Cohen directs here himself, which is a first for an Ali G feature: Ali G Indahouse was helmed by Mark Mylod. He shares the script with Anthony Hines and Peter Baynham, both of whom have history with the character, Hines having written across Baron Cohen's television work and Baynham having co-written Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan and its 2020 follow-up, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, both of which I've covered on this site. The premise deposits Ali in a recognisable spot: faced with an unexpected pregnancy and a dwindling sense of purpose, he heads to America in search of renewed relevance. Joining Baron Cohen in the cast are Morgana Robinson, a genuinely versatile comic performer well known for her impressions work on British television; Alpha Miknas; Clive Russell, a reliable Scottish character actor who tends to bring a certain grounded weight to whatever he appears in; and A$AP Rocky, whose casting as himself or some version thereof fits neatly into the film's attempt to anchor Ali's faded cultural currency against current hip-hop celebrity.
The film was shot by Chris Darnell and Luke Geissbühler, a pairing that brings a polished but functional visual approach, the kind of clean, mobile widescreen work that suits broad comedy without calling much attention to itself. There are no particularly striking images to report, the camera largely content to stay out of the way of the gags. The score is the work of Nami Melumad and Erran Baron Cohen (Sacha's brother, and a long-standing musical collaborator across the Baron Cohen projects), and it carries a flavour of early-noughties hip-hop and grime pastiche, the sonic equivalent of the character's wardrobe: familiar yellow tracksuit, oversized cap, unchanged by the passing years. That choice is presumably deliberate, a signal that Ali himself has not moved on, though whether that works as a joke or simply underlines a problem is very much the question the film has to answer.
There is the odd laugh in Ali G: Who Iz I?, but not many, and nowhere near enough to justify its existence. You can see, watching it, exactly why it ended up as what is essentially a direct-to-TV affair rather than a cinema release. It is, to be blunt, a bad film, and a bad film of a very particular, dispiriting kind: the long-after-the-fact revival that nobody especially needed.
Ali G was a product of his moment, and that moment has long since passed. Dragged out again two decades on, the character and his whole shtick feel badly outdated, and a fair bit of the humour now lands as simply offensive rather than provocative. What might once have seemed cheeky or subversive just feels tired, and the film keeps reaching for the same handful of gags it was reaching for twenty years ago, as though nothing has moved on since. The formula is threadbare.
And beneath the gags, such as they are, there is next to no story to speak of. Ali heads to America to reclaim his former glory with a baby on the way, but it is the barest scaffolding, an excuse to string the bits together rather than anything you could call a plot. Two stars. The odd chuckle aside, this is a tired, dated and largely story-free revival that makes a decent case for leaving some characters in the decade they belonged to.
Ali G: Who Iz I? will inevitably be measured against not just its own predecessor but against the broader arc of Baron Cohen's work, including the Borat films, which found ways to make the mockumentary format feel genuinely dangerous and alive. This one, by contrast, feels closer in spirit to the kind of revival that serves a nostalgic itch without really scratching it. For anyone curious about where the character sits in relation to Baron Cohen's other creations, my reviews of the first Borat film and its sequel offer a reasonable point of comparison. The 89-minute runtime is trim enough, and the production values are perfectly professional, but a film can be well-made and still have very little reason to exist. Some characters, it turns out, are products of a specific cultural moment, and the moment, in the end, does not travel.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2026 | Watched: 2026-11-04
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Ali G: Who Iz I? (2026) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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