I did have plans to go to the Sunny Colch Odeon on Monday afternoon for a cheapo cheapo grubby fiver cinema experience. On the agenda was Ali G’s Who Iz I?
Yep, I know.
But wait! What’s this?
Amazon Prime started spamming me, telling me it’s now available to watch as a freebie on the telly back home. Not quite straight to video, but straight to Amazon Prime.
Blimey, I’ll have a bit of that. A fiver here, a fiver there, it all adds up.
Cut to the chase: Ali G, Who Iz I? isn’t worth a grubby fiver. It’s a bloody awful film, but also funny as fuck in places. I think that’s the point.
The Graun liberal elite narrative leading up to the cinema release was the misuse of cultural appropriation and the dangers of taking such an approach in 2026.
This feels a little self-manufactured. The actual premise of the film takes the piss out of cultural appropriation, as well as asking a fairly serious question about what you can and can’t get away with, twenty years since Staine’s Finest first rocked up.
Surprisingly, there is a plot. It’s remarkably similar to Big in Japan, the big screen follow up for People Just Do Nothing, as the Kurupt FM crew attempt to restart their DJ careers after a downfall.
Ditto Ali G.
Having landed in the States, yer main man then takes flak from the left - is it because I iz black etc - and then also from the right, as he is used as a vehicle for free speech.
Shot by both sides, etc.
That all sounds a little heavy. Of course, it’s not heavy. It’s absolutely ridiculous, with the plot merely being something of a sideshow for some Jackass style humour.
It’s not exactly a spoiler, but I’m still laughing at the puerile and schoolboy humour of a new defence weapon that involves strapping a plastic backside onto you that then also has a dildo at the front. You tug away vigorously on the front to release a bullet mechanism coming out of the arsehole.
Pure gutter, pure lowest denominator. But then some fools over in the States generally bought into this concept and went about their masturbatory defence mechanism as though their lives depended on it.
I admit reaching for my phone around an hour or so in. It wasn’t anything Ali G related, just general Friday night Insta scrolling. You couldn’t get away with that in the cinema.
The ending is quite sweet. It does answer the question: Ali G, who iz I? The cultural appropriation of one community is then shifted to another, but that still doesn’t make it all right.
I’m not really sure who the joke is on. You could take a grand sweeping view and look at it from a societal perspective and say this type of comedy really should have been banished decades ago.
Or you could take a more postmodern perspective and say it’s basically On The Buses, 2026.
Or maybe it’s just a dumb ass film, innit.