Sacha Baron Cohen is bringing Ali G back to the big screen, with the first full trailer for “Ali G: Who Iz I?” now revealing a new round of interviews, ambushes and unsuspecting victims. The film marks the character’s first feature-length return in more than two decades.

Ali arrives with a fresh set of dreadlocks but little evidence of personal evolution. The tracksuits, sunglasses and deliberately misplaced confidence remain intact, as does his particular way of processing the world around him. After 20 years away, he has plenty to catch up on: a pandemic, wars, Ed Sheeran and, more unexpectedly, the pregnancy of his longtime girlfriend Julie.

The trailer offers brief looks at the people caught in Ali’s orbit this time around, including retired US Army general Stewart Rodeheaver and what appears to be an encounter with Canadian electronic musician Deadmau5 at a music festival. As ever, the comedy depends on the distance between Ali’s certainty and the reality everyone else is operating within.

The character first appeared on “The 11 O’Clock Show” in 1998 before becoming the centre of “Da Ali G Show”, which ran across three series in the early 2000s. Baron Cohen used Ali to approach politicians, scientists, academics and celebrities with questions and proposals that often became increasingly absurd without the subjects necessarily realising where the conversation was heading.

Buzz Aldrin was once asked whether humans could walk on the sun, with Ali suggesting that winter might be the appropriate season for the attempt. Donald Trump was presented with the concept of “ice-cream gloves”. The same series also introduced two characters who would later become major parts of Baron Cohen’s career: Borat Sagdiyev and Brüno.

Ali’s first feature arrived in 2002 with “Ali G Indahouse”, a scripted comedy that moved away from the unscripted interview format of the television series. Despite a mixed critical response, the film performed strongly in the UK, taking more than £17 million at the domestic box office.

Baron Cohen later announced the retirement of Ali G and Borat in 2007, arguing that their growing fame had made the original format increasingly difficult. Once audiences knew who was behind the characters, finding people genuinely unaware of what was happening became a much harder proposition.

Borat eventually returned in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” in 2020, bringing the character back into an increasingly chaotic political landscape and producing one of the most talked-about encounters of the film through Rudy Giuliani.

“Ali G: Who Iz I?” now extends that particular lineage. The character has aged in real time, but his worldview appears to have remained remarkably untouched by it.

The film is scheduled to arrive in cinemas on 23 October.

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