Now that Sacha Baron Cohen is too famous to get away with the hit-and-run pranks of Borat and Da Ali G Show, he’s just another superstar comedian playing to the cheap seats. His grotesque ethnic this time around is Admiral General Shabazz Aladeen, a vain North African strongman reminiscent of Saddam and Gaddafi, and for every clever gag (a video game that gives points for beheading Westerners) there are three stupid gross-outs (drinking urine, milking a woman like a cow, licking a lover’s unshaven armpits). Cohen probably thinks he’s Charlie Chaplin lampooning Hitler, but of course Hitler was still on top of the world when The Great Dictator came out in 1940; Cohen is actually Chaplin’s antithesis, a first-world bully content to target the Other. Larry Charles (Borat, Bruno) directed; with Ben Kingsley, Anna Faris, and John C. Reilly.
