Ali G Movie Backlash Intensifies With Campaign to Pull It From Cinemas

Ali G’s grand return has not exactly been met with an overwhelming cause for celebration, at least not from various corners of his home soil in the U.K., where a campaign has been launched aimed at stopping the character’s latest outing from hitting cinema screens.

Following the release earlier this week of the trailer for Amazon MGM‘s “Ali G: Who Iz I?,” a new mockumentary following Sacha Baron Cohen‘s famed faux rude boy, online negativity against the satirical figure and film has steadily grown. Many have taken to social media to accuse Ali G, who in the trailer is seen wearing fake dreadlocks and a Rastafarian hat and discussing his desire to be an “absent” father, of being an “outdated” and “racist” caricature.

On Wednesday, NewsCord — a news comparison and media monitoring platform — started a campaign urging cinemas around the world to refuse to screen the film, emailing major chains with the request on behalf of those who register. As of Friday, it claims to have been instructed to send more than 36,000 emails.

The campaign accuses Cohen of using satire as a “cover for enforcing racist stereotypes,” citing a newspaper report from 2000, just two years after Ali G first hit British TV screens, in which Black British comedians claimed the character was an “alibi for racism.”

Originally launched by Cohen in 1998 as part of Channel 4’s “11 O’Clock Show,” Ali G was created as a dim-witted white man imitating urban British hip-hop and Jamaican culture, the joke being that his deliberately offensive nature poked fun at his own ignorance and cultural appropriation in general. But in the 2000 article, the comedian Felix Dexter argued that the character “allows the liberal middle classes to laugh at Black street culture in a context where they can retain their sense of political correctness” — — views now echoed by many 26 years on and repeated as part of the NewsCord campaign. Meanwhile, Jeanette Winterson added: “I don’t know what the difference is between him and the Black and White Minstrels.”

In a new Substack post, British writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch asserted that, as offensive as she found Ali G in her youth — “I just knew he was mocking us,” she wrote — the character is now widely out of sync with today’s times.

“Black people don’t dress like that anymore. 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,” she wrote. “Baron Cohen’s so-called ‘humor’ is a crude compound of all these things.”

However, reports that NewsCord’s campaign against “Ali G: Who Iz I?” had already landed a major victory appear to be untrue. The site posted a reply from Picturehouse Cinemas to one its emails in which the U.K. exhibitor stated, “We currently do not have any plans to screen this film on its release,” which NewsCord claimed meant the chain would “not” be showing the title. This was subsequently picked up in the U.K. press.

Variety understands that the email was actually a standard customer response from Picturehouse to any release query about a film that hasn’t yet been booked by the company and didn’t appear on its schedule, with no decision yet made about “Ali G: Who Iz I?.” That being said, given the Picturehouse’s usual lean towards arthouse cinema and the film’s release date during the London Film Festival and the start of awards season, it’s perhaps unlikely that Ali G: Who Iz I?” would be a major focus for the chain anyway.

“Cinemas are there to engage and entertain the widest possible audience. They are not there to act as censors or arbiters of public taste,” Phil Clapp, head of the U.K. Cinema Association, told Variety regarding the campaign. “So where a film has been given a certificate by the BBFC, they will decide whether or not to play it solely with the likely response of their audience in mind.”

While it’s unknown whether Cohen expected the level of backlash to “Ali G: Who Iz I?” that has arisen, it’s clear he at least anticipated some negative retaliation. In a tweet linked to the trailer for “Ali G: Who Iz I?,” he wrote: “In an age when a single comedian’s career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I’d play it safe and bring this guy back.”

Variety has reached out to Amazon and Cohen’s reps at CAA for comment.