Ali G Indahouse

Dir: Mark Mylod
2002
I came across this purely by accident on HBO while we were channel surfing, so I can’t be too disappointed that it turned out to be much much less than of what the Ali G show is capable. The Ali G shows gets all its tension and humor from the collision of a brilliant fiction with a unwitting reality, as Sacha Baron Cohen’s homeboy character asks blindingly dumb questions of his various guests, who have pegged him for a moron or worse.
But throw the character into a scenario where he must prevail as a sort of hero, and immediately you have problems. In reality, an Ali G would be brought up short by reality immediately, but then we wouldn’t have a movie, so Ali G’s story here paints him as the wise fool, recruited by a scheming politician to run for a local council seat and cause the Prime Minister to fall. This is the “Producers” ruse, and it comes undone similarly, where Ali G’s idiotic yet straight talk makes him the most popular politician in the land. There is a slim satire of Blair’s “Cool Britannia” in all this, but it never really pays off.
Instead we get poo jokes, dick jokes, and drug jokes, and though some is funny, most could have come from any number of inane teen comedies.