Sacha Baron Cohen serves up shock and guffaw.
This review is for Grimsby, which is called The Brothers Grimsby in some territories.
Did Mark Strong lose a bet with Sacha Baron Cohen? His character is so demeaned, degraded and humiliated in new film Grimsby that one wonders if Strong owed the comedy star and paid him back by allowing a variety of bodily fluids to be sprayed on his person. Strong nevertheless plays his scenes straight, and the actor’s square-jawed stoicism in the face of such abuse and exploitation provides the biggest laughs in a film that’s chock-full of them.
Cohen plays Norman ‘Nobby’ Butcher, a beer-swilling, football-loving oaf with Liam Gallagher hair and an attitude to match. Nobby wears socks with sandals, eats from a kebab grill in his kitchen, and gives his kids names like Skeletor, Gangnam Style and Django Unchained.
But Nobby also has a big heart; one which was broken when he and brother Sebastian were separated as kids. Nobby hasn’t seen Sebastian for 28 years, ignorant of the fact that his sibling is now a Bond-like MI6 Agent who heads up a special Black Ops Unit called Tiger Tail.
The film’s early moments juxtapose Nobby drinking, effing, blinding and offending all and sundry with action-packed scenes of Sebastian taking out targets, shot in the style of a first-person shooter by Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier.
Which makes the film initially feel somewhat disjointed, but then the brothers are reunited and proceedings take flight. A dastardly plan to reduce the world’s population forces Sebastian on the run, and a set of circumstances too convoluted and bizarre to describe here result in his taking refuge at the family house in Grimsby.
Cue jokes at the expense of Nobby’s ignorance, poverty, and all-round northerness. But there’s little malice in the humour, the caricatures so broad that it’s impossible to take them seriously, with Strong’s Sebastian – brought up with a silver spoon in his mouth – just as much the butt of the jokes.
And so the self-styled ‘Butcher Boys’ are forced to re-team to save the world, their mission somewhat randomly taking them to South Africa, and then onto Chile where the World Cup Final is under threat.
It’s a stupid plot, and there’s no doubt that SBC’s films are dumbing down, with Grimsby lacking the social and political bite of Borat, Bruno and even The Dictator which, while painfully unfunny, at least had some satirical worth.
Shoe-horned contrivances revolving around a tracking device, some holiday snaps, and Nobby’s love of anal fireworks also make you wish that they’d spent a little more time on the script. Indeed last year’s Spy covered similar territory but more deftly combined action and comedy in a plot that didn’t make your eyes roll.
The jokes are plentiful and the hits just about outnumber the misses, but your enjoyment of the humour will depend on how funny you find children swearing, blocked toilets, pubic beards, registered sex offenders, elephant bukkake, and – in the film’s least believable moment – England reaching the final of a major tournament.
The script – which Cohen co-wrote with Peter Baynham and Phil Johnston – goes out of its way to shock and appal, with Daniel Radcliffe coming in for a particularly undeserved kicking. But if they aren't offended in the first five minutes, Grimsby features the kind of humour that will have audiences doubling up in spite of themselves, and feeling like they need a good scrub once the credits have rolled.
The cast is uniformly game, the aforementioned Strong stealing the show with his deadpan delivery, and Cohen turning in a likably silly performance as Nobby, in spite of the fact that his accent meanders all over the midlands and north. And while they are given little to do, the likes of Rebel Wilson, Penelope Cruz, Isla Fisher, Gaboury Sidibe, Johnny Vegas, Ricky Tomlinson and John Thomson all sully themselves for the cause.
So consider Grimsby second-tier Sacha Baron Cohen. The man verges on genius when combining the smartly sublime with the ridiculous to expose injustice and hypocrisy. But Grimsby is just ridiculous – a series of knob and fart gags writ large on a massive budget. But as dumb and unsophisticated comedies go, it succeeds, the laughs coming thick and fast and filled with regret.
The Verdict
While Nobby is one of Sacha Baron Cohen's least memorable characters, he's the star of a film that features some of his most unforgettable jokes. So if you can leave your social conscience at the door, and don't mind a duff plot and paper-thin characters, you'll find Grimsby to be very, very funny.
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