Scott Aaronson renders a judgement on the Borat movie (scroll down into the comments), but I think my opinion is best summed up by Kevin Drum:
[T]he lesson of the movie wasn’t some razor-sharp subversive point about how we’re all racists and xenophobes an inch under the surface, the lesson was that if you act like a complete whack job you can get ordinary people flustered and flummoxed. This doesn’t really strike me as any kind of surprise.
This can be sort of amusing in five-minute chunks, but I don’t think it would hold up for a full-length movie. As a result, I have no intention of paying good money to see this in the theater.
If the Borat guy had stuck to racist assholes that would be one thing (though it still wouldn’t make his painful schtick watchable), but making ordinary folks feel bad by acting like a complete loon — where’s the funny?
What I really, really don’t get, though, is why anyone ever signs the video releases.
Like you, I thought Borat wouldn’t hold up for an entire movie, but I went to see it with a group of friends anyway. It was hysterical. (The flustering and flummoxing normal people is only part of the movie.)
What I really, really don’t get, though, is why anyone ever signs the video releases.
Because they don’t read them fully, in part. This article (by one of the women who appears in the movie) talks about the process.