When critics claim to have laughed at the new Borat movie to the point of “suffocating” (Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle) or “til I wept” (Stephanie Zacharek, Time magazine), my impulse is to hiss back: “You sit on a throne of LIES!”

That’s an actually funny line from Elf (2003), by the way. Unfortunately, there aren’t many funny lines, or funny scenes, or funny anything in the overplotted and overstuffed Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. The original Borat from back in 2006 caught the zeitgeist at the perfect moment near the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, raking in over $250 million on an $18 million budget.

But Amazon’s sequel to the 2006 hit tries — and fails — to provide acceptable substitutes for almost every element that worked the first time around. Instead of the original’s neon green “mankini” that made us all too well acquainted with Sacha Baron Cohen’s body, the sequel features a “maskini” in honor of COVID-19 — a blue hospital mask barely covering Cohen’s genitals. In the closing scenes of the movie, we’re even given some awkward pageantry about Dr Anthony Fauci clashing with “Karen,” a woman in a red “All Lives Matter” T-shirt. Haha?