Originally published March 13, 2016 on FrontRowCentral.com
I sat all alone in a dark theater watching Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest film, The Brothers Grimsby, and while he’s definitely to blame for the scatological horrors unfolding onscreen, the only person I hated was myself. I hated myself for paying money on a Friday evening to see the star of Borat make yet another fool of himself. I hated myself for sitting through vomit-inducing sight gag after vomit-inducing sight gag. And I hated myself for laughing at a handful of the worst gags the movie had to offer. Most of all, though, I hated myself for finding the kernel of goodness underneath all of Cohen’s mean-spirited poop. Because while The Brothers Grimsby is aggressively offensive, there’s a genuinely sweet spirit at the heart of this film aching to get out.
For twenty-eight years, smalltown pub-rat Nobby (Sacha Baron Cohen) has been searching for his long-lost baby brother Sebastian, from whom he was separated by an adoption agency at the age of six. After a random tip sends Nobby to a press conference on world health, he reconnects with Sebastian (Mark Strong), who turns out to be a secret agent sent to stop an assassination attempt on philanthropist Rhonda George (Penelope Cruz). Naturally, Nobby screws things up for Sebastian, but he sticks to his baby brother like glue and helps him stop a terrorist organization from unleashing a supervirus at the World Cup finals in Chile.
In between these broad strokes of plot are dozens of gags designed to make us dry heave. The most outrageous of these involves Nobby and Sebastian hiding from a group of hitmen by climbing inside an elephant’s vagina. Not content to let that be the joke, Cohen then decides to follow through and have a male elephant intervene and…well…you can imagine where it goes from there. (The clip is online if you really feel like hunting it down.) Believe it or not, this gag is not an isolated incident. Elephant vaginas come up no less than four times; the movie is only 82 minutes long.
Speaking of which, being so short leaves The Brothers Grimsby frantically searching for the proper tone. The film presents itself as a hard-edged spy thriller with some outlandish action sequences courtesy of Transporter director Louis Leterrier. Then, Sacha Baron Cohen undercuts all the action with Nobby’s lowbrow goofus act, decked out like he just took last place at a Liam Gallagher lookalike contest. Then, all of this is interspersed with tearjerking flashbacks of Nobby and Sebastian’s childhood, which explain how the two Butcher Boys of Grimsby came to be tragically orphaned and separated. It would be an understatement to say the film has a bit of a personality disorder.
The trouble with these flashback sequences is that they’re genuinely heartwarming. I wouldn’t normally call sincerity a problem, but with Sacha Baron Cohen trying his hardest to take the piss out of the spy genre, these sequences feel like part of a completely different film stitched into the final cut. They also don’t feel as rushed or chopped up as the rest of the film. Cohen and Leterrier really want us to buy into this sentimentality so that we cheer for Nobby and Sebastian teaming up to kick some third act ass. Except Sebastian begrudgingly accepts his idiot brother from the moment they reconnect, so that payoff comes about an hour before it’s supposed to.
As transgressive as The Brothers Grimsby is — complete with “Donald Trump gets AIDS” jokes, elephant sex, casual heroin use, Rebel Wilson as Nobby’s equally boorish wife, and a thousand potshots at the working class — all the shocking moments can’t betray the warm heart buried deep underneath. Sacha Baron Cohen may be known for shock comedies starring characters that rip the status quo to shreds with reckless abandon, but what he’s made here feels more like a soft-hearted feature desperate to show the cool kids that it can still be disgusting. And good God, is it ever disgusting.
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