Sacha Boren Cohen’s fictional documentary, Borat, is an odd mix. On one level it’s brilliant, and his skewering of American culture is as fearless, pointed and outrageous as any I’ve seen.

But there’s also a self-indulgent edge to it. Since his satire has the subtlety of a sledge hammer, when he attacks an innocent target it’s pretty ugly.

Cohen, playing the part of a rube from Kazakhstan, travels across the southern and Western part of the U.S., eventually hoping to meet Pamela Anderson in California – a funny idea, to be sure. Along the way he inserts himself into real-life “candid camera” situations with unsuspecting subjects.

At a rodeo he interviews an old fellow who seems jovial but who in fact is horribly homophobic. Cohen (as Borat) skillfully plays the situation to highlight the man’s stupidity. At another point he hitches a ride with some drunken frat boys and it turns out that, yup, they’re callow and stupid. He’s particularly good at exposing and lampooning anti-Semitism, sending up caricatures of Jewish people.

Yet here’s where it gets troublesome. In the opening scenes in Kazakhstan (actually filmed in a Romanian village), he creates a similarly ugly caricature of the people who live in these small villages, portraying them all as half-wits, rapists, and prostitutes.

It’s a clear hypocrisy. He sends up anti-Semitism – properly so, and with a creative bite – but then he creates his own dark caricature of another group of people.

Similarly, there are people in the film who aren’t in on the joke who he shouldn’t be attacking. Like the people he hassles on the streets of New York as the cameras roll (or in the subway, where they have nowhere to run). Sure, their irritated reactions might be funny to some, but is it okay to irritate innocent passersby – actually even commit a kind of assault – for the sake of laughs?

So the final effect is unsettling. Cohen’s trope of the traveling rube is a fresh and effective way to reveal the dark underbelly of American life. And when he aims at a target he hits it. But Borat reveals him to be a narcissist, willing to do anything for a laugh regardless of the consequence.