Ali G: Who Iz I? – Staines’ finest is about to be a dad

Twenty years of chillin’, and now a baby

The set-up is simple. After twenty years of what the official synopsis cheerfully calls “chillin’, tokin’ and bonin'”, Ali G discovers that his long-term girlfriend, Julie, is eight months pregnant. Faced with an extra mouth to feed, he finally peels himself off the sofa and heads to America to win back his former glory. Naturally, he runs into enemies who end up threatening his existence and his unborn child’s. That’s as far as I’ll go. The film runs a trim 89 minutes, has a 15 certificate in the UK, and is billed as a straight comedy.

The fatherhood angle is the clever bit. Ali G was always a teenager in his own head, and making him face actual responsibility at an age when most of us were checking our pension pots is a solid comic engine. Whether it holds up for a whole film is another question.

Who’s in it and who’s behind it

Sacha Baron Cohen stars and directs, so whatever works or doesn’t is down to him. Joining him are Morgana Robinson, Alpha Miknas and Clive Russell, plus a pair of guests who will make your kids look up from their phones: A$AP Rocky and Rihanna. Celebrity cameos have always been part of the Ali G formula. The original Channel 4 run was built on getting the great and the good to sit down for interviews they didn’t realise were a wind-up.

Readers of a certain age will remember the arc. First came the Channel 4 sketches and Da Ali G Show, which turned a lad from Staines into a national catchphrase machine. Then, in 2002, came Ali G Indahouse, a big-screen romp that critics sniffed at and teenage boys quoted endlessly in sixth-form common rooms. It made a lot of money and almost nobody admits to owning the DVD.

What works, and what might not

The big risk is obvious. Ali G belonged to a time before social media, when a famous politician could still be caught off guard by a bloke in a bright tracksuit. Those ambush interviews were the real genius of the character, and that trick doesn’t work in a scripted feature, any more than it did in Indahouse. Without the unsuspecting victim, Ali G is a sketch character carrying a plot, and 89 minutes is a long time to be a sketch.

Ali G was always funniest when the joke was on the people sitting opposite him. The question for this comeback is who is sitting opposite him now.

On the plus side, Baron Cohen has spent the years since sharpening his craft: the Borat films proved he can still blend scripted silliness with real-world mischief, and he knows this character down to the last “respek”. Sending Ali G to America makes sense too, since that’s where his later TV shenanigans made the most noise. And the short running time means it doesn’t outstay its welcome the way so many bloated streaming comedies do.

What the critics are saying

At the time of writing, the major UK and US critics had yet to publish their verdicts, and there’s no Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic score to go on. Given how split opinion was on Indahouse, which was dismissed by plenty of reviewers and then adored by the audience it was made for, I’d expect another divide between broadsheet critics and the fans who still greet each other with a finger click.

Where to watch it in the UK

Ali G: Who Iz I? is a Prime Video title in the UK, with its premiere listed for 22 October 2026. It’s included in a standard Prime membership, so no extra rental fee, which takes the sting out if it turns out to be a one-watch wonder. Bear in mind the 15 rating: language and innuendo come as standard, so think twice before putting it on with your mother-in-law in the room.

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Verdict

Ali G: Who Iz I? is a nostalgia gamble with a decent hook: a man-child forced to grow up just as his body is telling him he already has. It will live or die on whether Baron Cohen can make a character born of prank interviews work in a fully scripted story, something even Indahouse only half managed. I think it’ll go down best with men who quoted the Channel 4 show at the pub in 2000 and fancy 89 undemanding minutes on a Friday night with a beer, especially if they enjoyed Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. If you found Ali G Indahouse a chore the first time round, or you prefer your comedy closer to Detectorists than to a Staines bus shelter, I’d skip it and save the evening.

Sources

• IMDb – Ali G: Who Iz I? (2026) title page
• Amazon – Official Ali G: Who Iz I? page

Ali G: Who Iz I? – 2026 – Prime Video – Cast includes:
Sacha Baron Cohen, Morgana Robinson, Alpha Miknas, Clive Russell
Images from TMDB. Streaming data from JustWatch.