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Sacha Baron Cohen has set a high bar of comic expectations for his loyal audience. “Borat” is probably the funniest film of the 21st century. Ali G is one of the greatest pop culture creations of social satire to come along. Cohen’s “Dictator” was a significant piece of political satire.
But where Sacha Baron Cohen excels as poker-faced satirical personalities engaging the unwitting targets of his humor before the camera, the comic mastermind stammers when it comes to doing straight comedy.
“The Brothers Grimsby” is a lazy spy action-comedy that feels like the Farrelly Brothers made it. Gross-out taboo humor arrives in rare guffaw-inducing spasms during extreme set pieces involving the interior of an elephant’s vaginal canal, and one having to do with a poison dart that strikes a brother in his testicle.
Incest, crack addiction, and HIV-AIDS are some of the low-hanging fruit that Cohen pulps with every comic approach he can muster. You can’t help but think that Sacha Baron Cohen should be doing more sophisticated jokes. He’s better than this.
Cohen plays Nobby Butcher, a soccer-loving native of the port village of Grimsby. The Noel Gallagher wig that Cohen wears gives his working class character an appropriately whimsical appearance of impoverished style sense.
The pot-bellied Nobby has been prolific in the baby-making department. He and his wife Julie (Rebel Wilson) have nearly a dozen children. Still, Nobby keeps his long-lost brother Sebastian’s room in the family home reserved for the day he returns. Now, 28-years since the brothers last saw one another Nobby reunites with Sebastian (played gamely by Mark Strong), who has become a secret MI6 agent. Considering that Sebastian looks like a well-heeled skinhead, and Nobby looks like a soccer lout, the brothers share an idealogical corollary.
The film’s spy plotline is merely a MacGuffin-fuelled enabler for slapstick comedy bits that arrive at infrequent intervals. That said, the film’s large-scale rib-tickling climax, set inside a soccer stadium where South Africa and Chile face off, is as silly as anything imaginable.
When the second meepy flashback of Nobby and Sebastian when they were boys arrives, you know this movie isn’t going to live up to Cohen’s self-imposed hype. Louis Leterrier (“The Transporter”) is not a good fit for a Sacha Baron Cohen. It’s doubtful that Cohen’s regular director Larry Charles could have done much better, but I suspect the results would have been funnier. Nonetheless, mediocre is not good enough for a talent like Sacha Baron Cohen. We’ve come to expect more. It’s time for Cohen to create a new character.
Rated R. 82 mins.
