'Ali G: Who Iz I?' Review: A Deflating and Messy Return For a Comedy Legend
By Dan Bremner - October 24, 2026
The belated sequel to the 2002 British comedy classic, bringing Ali G back to the screen after twenty-four years away to ask the question we all ask ourselves when we look in the mirror before heading to our soul-destroying jobs: “Who Iz I?”. I don’t think a release this year has filled me with such an equal amount of dread and curiosity.
Alistair Leslie Graham is very much a figure of the early 2000s, and a lot of questions arrived with this one (which only got a two-day theatrical engagement). Is Ali G no longer relevant? Is Sacha Baron Cohen still capable of being funny? Is it a bit sad to watch a 54-year-old man drag up a man-child character he played in his twenties? Will this be a crushing disappointment? The answer to all of those is somehow yes. The pitiful trailers filled no one with confidence, yet Cohen still proves he’s got a bit of gas left in the tank with his most famous character, even if the results are nothing less than uneven.
If you’re going in expecting any real continuity with Ali G Indahouse, prepare for disappointment. A bit of archive footage gets wheeled out, but it’s basically treated as non-canon. Instead we pick up with Ali, who’s been unemployed and broke since the last season of Da Ali G Show, trying to force a comeback by heading to Los Angeles to make HBO honour a twenty-year-old offer for a third season. He missed their multi-million-dollar proposal because his fax machine wasn’t plugged in. On top of that, Me Julie (with Morgana Robinson replacing Kellie Bright) is unexpectedly eight months pregnant and he’s doing everything he can to dodge impending fatherhood. The whole thing is flimsy as hell. Calling it a plot is generous, it’s mostly an excuse to bounce from one set-piece or prank to the next.
Somehow it still manages to overcomplicate itself by dragging in two other characters Cohen played in his short-lived 2018 Showtime series Who Is America?. So we get Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello, an ultrawoke liberal spokesperson determined to cancel Ali for cultural appropriation, who hires Erran Morad, an ex-Mossad agent, to put a permanent stop to Ali G’s offensive antics. Even writing that sentence feels messy, which is probably why this 89-minute comedy somehow feels a lot longer than it is. Even at one of the busiest screenings I've ever had at my local cinema, complete with people dressed as Ali G, there were a lot of stretches with silence and an audience becoming more impatient towards this that you could feel in real-time. A lot of this just didn't land, even for its core audience.
That messiness is the core problem. At its heart this is trying to go back to the real-people prank style that made Cohen a household name, pulling in members of the public and pushing them until they reveal something ugly about themselves. In that respect Who Iz I? does still manage to shock. He gets crowds doing Nazi salutes in the name of free speech, saying outrageously bigoted things, and in the third act even fools people into committing some genuinely horrific acts that won’t be spoiled here. The trouble is that the character and the satire around him now feel dated and out of step. Ali G’s whole 1990s/early-2000s bag of cultural-appropriation jokes, slang and ignorance-based pranks sits uncomfortably in 2026. What once felt like sharp mockery can now read as an ironic or nostalgic celebration of the thing it used to skewer, or worse, as something adjacent to the outdated caricature it was supposed to be sending up. The film tries to address this by making Ali himself a target of critique and by pairing him with the other Cohen personas, but those attempts mostly fall flat or feel forced.
It never gets close to the impact or relevance of Borat or Brüno either. Hoodwinking people is harder in a more media-savvy and defensive era, the usable real footage often feels brief and limited, and a lot of the political and social targets come across as rehashed. The tone stays broad, crass and frequently more offensive than effective, spectacular bad taste and gross-out energy that sometimes feels like it’s just embarrassing the people on screen rather than landing a meaningful punch. After decades of boundary-pushing, the revival itself can feel like the most questionable part.
As Cohen’s feature directorial debut, the film is uneven in pacing and focus. Jumping between Ali G, the ultra-leftist professor and the Mossad agent adds complication without consistently elevating the comedy or the commentary. You can feel it straining to be about cancel culture, relevance and free speech, but the structure never quite holds. It's also very visually flat, while it attempts to be “cinematic” it very much feels tailor-made for streaming with that almost GoCompare ad like style that does not give me much hope for Cohen as a director going forward. He really needed a Larry Charles to bring out the best of his work while he focuses on the pranks.
And yet, when the gags do land, they still work. There are stretches that are properly funny or even legitimately laugh-out-loud. Cohen remains naturally quick and committed in the role, and his improvisational instincts still produce plenty of laughs even when the surrounding film is lurching about. Some of the larger pranks and stunts are impressive in a pure Jackass-level way that are high-stakes, athletic, and spectacularly tasteless. A few late-act sequences involving AI, a TV game show, a drone and the recruitment of real people are genuinely gobsmacking and rank among the most memorable bits. There’s also a degree of self-awareness about the character’s own datedness, the cultural-appropriation critiques and the current climate around speech and prejudice. It frames itself with a Voltaire quote and tries to draw lines between the scripted and the real. You can see what it’s reaching for, even when it doesn’t get there.
Ali G: Who Iz I? is an uneven, often messy and frequently dated return for Sacha Baron Cohen’s most famous character that still manages scattered genuine laughs, strong improvisational energy and a handful of outrageous, high-stakes pranks. The flimsy plot, overcomplicated multi-persona structure, out-of-step satire and broad crassness stop it from ever becoming more than a curious, occasionally funny curiosity. Respec’ for the effort, but the answer to “Who Iz I?” turns out to be “someone who maybe should have stayed buried”.
'Ali G: Who Iz I?' is out now in cinemas following its release on October 23, 2026.
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Dan Bremner
Writer
Dan is a writer from Guildford with a love for all things genre, schlocky, and thoroughly '80s, and a part-time philanthropist.
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