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Sacha Baron Cohen in his pre-Grimsby days
C-The only thing worse than unfunny, tasteless fat jokes, gay jokes, and bodily fluid jokes is hearing those same jokes repeated over and over in the same movie. Sadly, audiences watching The Brothers Grimsby undoubtedly won’t remember its sometimes clever social satire and sharp action scenes. But they will remember a sequence involving Sacha Baron Cohen, Mark Strong, and a female elephant that makes Tom Green‘s Freddy Got Fingered seem like Jane Austen in comparison.
Cohen stars in The Brothers Grimsby as Nobby, an idiotic, beer-swilling, soccer-loving lower class British slacker who was separated as an orphaned child from his younger brother Sebastian (played as adult by Strong). Now, Sebastian is MI6’s top agent, but their reunion goes awry when Nobby inadvertently sabotages Sebastian’s current mission. With Sebastian on the run but still trying to foil an upcoming biological warfare attack, Nobby again tries to provide assistance to his younger brother.
In addition to his starring role, Cohen co-wrote the screenplay and was the driving creative force behind The Brothers Grimsby. He’s willing to play the complete idiot here, a chav version of Inspector Clouseau, but he uses the characterization to make some clever satirical points. For example, Nobby has one of his children (appropriately named Luke, short for “leukemia”) feign cancer to get extra welfare payments. Strong is very good as the straight man here, trying to mask acute discomfort and maintain his distance from his own roots. However, for every genuinely clever joke in The Brothers Grimsby, Cohen includes two or three that even Adam Sandler would reject. The creaky juvenile chestnut about sucking the poison out of a wound in Sebastian’s groin becomes the basis of a stupefying, five-minute routine. Even worse is the aforementioned elephant joke, which goes on far too long as well. Veteran action director Louis Leterrier ably crafts some quite impressive chase scenes in Grimsby, but he’s completely at a loss to keep Cohen in check, allowing bad scenes and worse jokes to drag on. As a result, the film’s 83-minute running time seems far longer. The Brothers Grimsby could have been a lower class counterpoint to the Austin Powers films; instead, it’s an Anglicized version of The Hangover with Sacha Baron Cohen playing all three idiots at once.
In this scene, Sacha Baron Cohen enlists the aid of local school children to fight the bad guys. Our full review of The Brothers Grimsby is now available on Silver Screen Cinema.
Photo credit: “Sacha Baron Cohen” by Joella Marano / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0
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