I’m no fan of Sacha Baron Cohen and this is certainly not one of his better films. Still, I’ve seen plenty of clips from it circulating online and I thought it might at least be a comedy that is worth a few laughs. As it turned out, the best parts of it are the ones already being widely shared and from when the character in Wadiya itself. Once he arrives in America, it’s an endless series of increasingly implausible skits notable only for their readiness to cause the most offence possible. It’s mildly amusing at most and not something I would recommend watching, but it is surprising how Cohen could convince famous Hollywood stars to make cameo appearances that involve degrading themselves.

Haffaz Aladeen, who absurdly styles himself as Admiral-General, is the dictator of the Eastern African nation of Wadiya. Being able to rule the desert kingdom without restraint and always ready to execute anyone he dislikes, he is childish, racist, misogynist and much more, but is not without a certain cunning. He refuses to sell his country’s oil fields and is working on developing nuclear weapons to preserve his country’s independence. However when his nuclear program fails as he had ordered the death of the program’s director Nadal and the UN votes to militarily intervene, he is obliged to travel to New York to address the UN Security Council. His uncle Tamir Mafraad takes the opportunity to have him assassinated and replaces him with dim-witted decoy. However Aladeen survives the assassination attempt and after his beard is shaved off, wanders the streets of New York without being recognized. He is taken in by Zoey, a human rights activist who believes that he is Wadiyan dissident. He also runs into Nadal and a thriving Wadiyan community in New York as it turns out that all of the people he ordered to be executed were actually just exiled instead. Despite living in the US for years, Nadal still prefers the way things are done in Wadiya and so agrees to help Aladeen return to power.

All of the widely shared clips from this film are set in Wadiya with Aladeen as the ruling dictator. There’s a zany, over-the-top quality to these scenes that are fun. The antics are stupid and ridiculous, yet we when study the lives of real life dictators, it’s often far worse and that’s what makes this so funny. What I didn’t realize is that Aladeen goes to the US rather quickly in the film and after that, it’s dramatically less amusing and less original as we already have movies like Coming to America. As ridiculous as what Aladeen does in Wadiya, it’s still believable as this is what happens in a society where the ruler is unconstrained by any thing. By contrast, the plot has to contort itself into impossible twists to explain how Aladeen survives an assassination attempt and survives in New York as a penniless and homeless man. Even the actors visibly have a hard time justifying the lines they need to deliver and look increasingly frustrated at the gags that go on long past the point where they are funny or plausible.

Cohen purports to be an equal opportunity comedian who pokes at everyone. So here he is mocking leftist liberals as exemplified by Zoey for being cluelessly dumb as part of their naive idealism. Plus of course he happily makes fun of the usual shibboleths of greedy oil executives and the political and social problems in Western countries. Yet while I am not without some sympathy for anti-woke arguments, they are not at all morally equivalent. It’s just not funny to have Aladeen laugh at the uselessness of handicapped refugees when on the other side of the coin, you have a dictator casually ordering the deaths of everyone around him. It even leaves a sour taste in my mouth when Cohen feels the need to water down Aladeen’s awfulness a little by making it so that his ordered executions were ineffective all along. If you’re going to have schtick, at least have the gumption to commit to it.

So yeah, even if the premise seems somewhat promising and the online clips from it are funny, watching the full movie is a waste of time. It doesn’t help either that the humor here is crassly in-your-face with no special insight involved.