Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G is returning to the big screen in October, and so is the controversy that has trailed the dreadlocked character since his debut a quarter-century ago. A coalition of activists, including the group NewsCord, is now organizing a boycott campaign against Ali G: Who Iz I?, the Amazon/MGM Studios sequel that follows the character on a comeback tour to revive his floundering rap career.
According to Variety, left-wing activists are flooding theaters with emails protesting the film, which they say leans on a racist stereotype of Black people. NewsCord is behind the push, aiming to send some 37,000 emails to cinemas and movie houses warning them not to screen the film when it debuts October 23.
Activists revive old criticisms
The campaign leans on two decades of criticism that has followed Ali G, a character Cohen created in the 1990s as a parody of British youth culture and wannabe gangster rappers. In a statement, NewsCord cited Black British comedians who in 2000 called the character “an alibi for racism,” and invoked author Jeanette Winterson’s comparison of Ali G to the Black and White Minstrels, a British minstrel show widely considered a racist relic.
British writer Afua Hirsch added her voice on Substack, arguing the character is simply out of step with the times. “Black people don’t dress like that anymore,” she wrote. “Even white people imitating Black people don’t talk like that anymore. Sexualizing black women and casually mocking working class women is not accepted anymore. Baron Cohen’s so-called ‘humor’ is a crude compound of all these things.”
The character has drawn criticism not just for racial stereotyping but for his crude mockery of working-class British culture, a strain of Cohen’s satire that has long divided audiences.
Cohen’s knowing response
Cohen appears to have anticipated the backlash. Promoting the film on X, he joked: “In an age where a comedian’s career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I’d play it safe and bring this guy back.”
The quip is classic Cohen — a wink at the controversy swirling around his most famous creation. But some observers note the timing may be off; the idea that a single joke can destroy a career is itself a few years behind the cultural curve, as the landscape has shifted considerably since the peak of the cancel-culture discourse.
Cinemas refuse to blink
So far, the boycott campaign has hit a wall. Not a single U.K. cinema chain targeted by the letter-writing effort has announced it will refuse to screen the film. One Danish theater chain, Nordisk Film Biografer (NFBIO), has gone further and issued a public defense of the movie.
In a statement reported by Variety, the chain said it understands that Cohen’s satire has sparked debate over the years and that a figure like Ali G can be experienced as offensive or provocative. But, the chain argued, programming a diverse range of films is a fundamental principle, and censorship is not its job.
“We do not consider it our task as a cinema to exercise censorship or to reject films that are legally distributed and aimed at an adult audience, based on discussions about the film’s moral or satirical justification,” the statement read. “Where some experience that all boundaries are crossed, others see a form of satire where no one gets away with it.”
The chain added that it trusts its audience to make informed choices about what they watch.
A familiar debate
The clash over Ali G: Who Iz I? revives a question that has followed Cohen throughout his career: does satire that mocks racists by embodying them end up amplifying the very stereotypes it targets? Critics have long argued that the line between parody and perpetuation is too thin with Ali G, particularly for audiences unfamiliar with Cohen’s broader body of work. Supporters counter that Cohen’s characters — Borat, Bruno, and the various personas populating his shows — are sharp-edged observers of prejudice, not vehicles for it.
The film’s title, Who Iz I?, and Sony Pictures UK’s promotional tagline, “He iz back. We ain’t liable,” suggest Cohen and the studio are leaning into the controversy rather than running from it. The deliberate misspellings and the defensive-sounding slogan read as a knowing provocation to the film’s critics.
Likely to fizzle
Despite the noise, the boycott effort is probably wasted energy. The film is widely expected to open October 23 and then fade quickly from theaters without making much of a ripple, given the long gap since Ali G’s cultural peak and the character’s diminished relevance to today’s audiences.
The real test will come in the weeks after release, when the box office numbers either validate the activists’ claims of a cultural shift or prove that the character’s long-simmering controversies no longer carry the weight they once did. For now, the standoff between protesters and theater chains remains unresolved, with the industry watching to see whether any major exhibitor blinks first.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2026/08/28/video-woke-mob-to-boycott-woke-borat-star-sacha-baron-cohen-over-racist-ali-g-character-in-upcoming-sequel-movie/