Director: Louis Letterier
Cast Headliners : Sacha Baron Cohen, Mark Strong
Original Release Date : March 11th, 2016
Sacha Baron Cohen
excels when he nearly fully makes the movie about his latest wacky
character. Whether it was Ali G's love of rap, or Borat/Bruno/General
Aladeen's clever yet unique stereotypes his comedy films have been a
wonky and ridiculous funny ride through a set of shenanigans in a
outside world. The Brothers Grimsby has many of these elements, but
not handled the best. But its certainly not ..uneventful and without
chuckles.
The latest creation
here is Nobby (Sacha Baron Cohen), a British extremely dedicated and
extremely dumb soccer hooligan who lives in Grimsby. He's been
separated from his brother Sebastian (Mark Strong) since birth, and
he randomly runs into him again after many years at the latter
s job.... as a MI6
spy agent. This premise , largely seen in the trailer as will be
gotten into later, soon leads to them on a globe trotting adventure.
While Cohen's
movies have never exactly had incredible plots, they usually have had
slightly more substance than this. The story is weak and generic
which serves as a slight canvas to paint Nobby's idiocy against but
its mainly there to exist as a place to hold a series of gross and
silly jokes. The “outside” world in this film is not the
mainstream like the past few films in this “Series” but what
could have been interesting is for the most part floating in the
background.
What does succeed,
one of the few things that do in this film, is the pairing between
Nobby and Sebastian. Cohen can sometimes have a good line to cause
laughs here, but more than ever is just a bit player in a avalanche
of extreme silly. Likewise Strong's Sebastian is pretty suave and
charismatic on his own, much like the other British genre characters
he no doubt parodies, but when the two brothers are mixed together
shenanigans ensure. Their wildly clashing personality types make for
some good jokes and there's a warm, albeit lukewarm, comedic
chemistry between them which is something that hasn't been seen since
Borat and perhaps even improves on that film's duo slightly.
Unfortunately,
while its funny to see Sebastian being as grimly serious as he is in
this silly comedy, it's less so exciting to see the film's attempts
at action scenes. For some reason they are often filmed in the first
person, which can be nauseatic besides a brief couple of comedic
uses. The visual effects are subpar and attempted cool moments are
usually brief or weakly anticlimatic. The same “Why” can be
said for the far too many “emotional” flashbacks to the brother's
childhood which detract from the mood.
The film gave away
most of it moments and laughs in the trailers leading up to its
release. There's not much more besides momentary, rarely effective ,
chuckles from bits involving Nobby's wife Dawn (Rebel Wilson) and 11
meme named kids, Sebastian's spy commander (Ian McShane),
philathronpist Rhonda George (Penelope Cruz), or South African maid
Banu (Gabourey Sidibe). They are all featured at parts but get lost
in a parade of silliness that can't quite find its direction. In
fact, Sidibe's sequence is one of the few positively memorable parts
as it features Nobby attempting to be a secret agent and adopting a
bad Sean Connery accent as cover due to circumstances. It has the
film keeping direction on a gag for more than a few moments, and its
the better tier for it.
What, for the most
part, wasn't shown in the trailers was the typical Cohen levels of
grossout and extreme gags that could never appear in any ad. He truly
seems to have tried to break past the scale of his past edgy moments
, to mixed results. While most are so shocking they can't be
forgotten, that's not always a good thing. This movie isn't for a
queasy person, or someone expect substance from their gross out parts
for that matter. There's a extreme amount of these gags involving sex
, disease, and violence. There's more than most comedies and even his
past works and such;while some may find these moments extremely
humorous their frequency and substitution for what he does best
couldn't be exactly called the best approach to how to have made this
film. The levels of shock is even to a point in some cases that it
even seems to be to the point of parody, but actually... here it is
not.
The Brother Grimsby
has a lot of problems and is far from Sacha Baron Cohen's best work.
However, it is not his worst either. Nobby makes for a decently funny
new character, at times, and his interaction with his brother
Sebastian is truly decent. There's a few other miscellaneous alright
jokes mixed in as well and momentary clever parodies of British and
spy tropes. But these bits of good are buried in a lot of extreme
muck. But as said, it isn't forgettable. Not entirely for pleasant
reasons though. 6.9 out of 10
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