Bruno

Synopsis:  Austrian fashionista, Brüno (Sacher Baron Cohen) goes to America in search of fame.

Brüno is the weakest of Sacher Baron Cohen’s characters and it was going to take something very special to justify a feature film devoted to him, particularly after the monster success of Borat (2006). Despite all the PR hoopla, Brüno doesn't justify the hype. The two films differ little in essence. The fake working title “Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt”, tells you pretty much all you need to know about this one. Once again Cohen travels the US luring his unsuspecting victims into making complete fools of themselves. There’s no denying Cohen’s audacity in this respect. His adventures with Southern rednecks are truly incomparable. Well, unless you count his adventures with Southern rednecks in Borat. And there’s the problem. Borat worked because its pranks were so outrageously original. You can’t achieve that pizazz again with variations on the same material.

The other reason that the earlier film worked so well was that Borat Sagdiyev was such an engaging character. His faux pas were as much the result of his linguistic and socio-cultural ineptitude as his intellectual shortcomings. The charm of Borat as a comic character was that he was funny without knowing it.  Much the same could be said of Ali G, Cohen’s other marvellous creation. Brüno, however has no redeeming virtues.  Ben Stiller did the impossibly vain, shallow and dim male supermodel thing with Zoolander (2001), but Stiller was sensible enough to give Derek Zoolander an endearing side.  Brüno is vain and shallow and dim but he is also relentlessly calculating and this tends to reflect negatively on Cohen himself. Brüno’s escapades are really Cohen’s traps and the film is no more than a series of jokes at other people’s expense. He certainly unearths some shockers, like the parents willing to subject their children to any form of abuse in order to make money out of them, and the vacuous "charity PR consultants" whose combined IQs are smaller than their bra size, but somehow Cohen comes off even worse for having set them up.  

There are some laugh-out loud moments in Brüno but equally much of its humour is simply juvenile, so unless you've really got no other options you should probably wait until it comes out as a DVD rental.

BTW: Two scenes have been cut from the Australian release in order to get an MA rating.

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