You can go home again, but usually when you do you find a lot of things have changed. Unlike our first go round with Kazakhstan‘s most famous fictional son, this outing is uneven, less focused, and not exactly the laugh riot we got from the original. That’s not to say that this movie isn’t funny; there are a number of good bits within this piece that provide some laugh-out-loud moments, but those scenes are too few. The plot is more diffuse here; unlike the first movie’s relatively straightforward storyline of Borat's quest to meet his dream girl—alas, Pam does not make a return appearance—this time it is abundantly clear that his and his daughter’s journey is a scattershot tour of various points in the country, with Texas being a main theater for the action, with predictable results. Indeed, a lot about this outing is predictable, leading to the sense that these scenes, in contrast with the first flick’s impromptu, guerrilla-style comedy, were largely staged. It seems like fewer and fewer of the participants were unwilling dupes, and that makes a lot of the jokes come across as flat. Ultimately, the conclusion is inevitable: try as he might, Cohen tried to pull off for a second time what was a one-time only trick. And that’s the kind of thing that will get you banished to Kazakhstan...or someplace worse: irrelevance.
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