Bruno

Review by Jason Donner

 

Sacha Baron Cohen needs to be examined by a qualified psychiatrist to determine where his obviously suicidal tendencies come from.  From insulting a terrorist in his face by saying Osama looks like a dirty old wizard to going camping with several shotgun toting rednecks in the guise of a gay Austrian who keeping trying to invade their tents in the middle of the night wearing nothing but bravery, the man is only one botched joke away from a stay in the emergency room or worse, a spot on the yearly Academy Award tribute montage.

In Bruno, Cohen takes on the identity of an Austrian fashion show host who is also bent like a three dollar bill.  Fired from his own show and officially declared "out" by the fashion world, Bruno decides to go to America and become a big Hollywood film star; His path to get there is paved with all sorts of unsuspecting people that he's ready to walk on to get there.

Following up on his 2006 megahit, Borat, Cohen's Bruno can best be described as six times as dirty and about 2/3rds as brilliant.  Where Borat managed to becoming socially relevant in shining a light on hidden American racism, Bruno has a much softer focus: It seems content to expose the shallowness of the population one minute, how easily we're offended the next, and then a select group's violent and quite frightening opposition to homosexuality the next.  Bruno goes from one goal to the other to the other like it's being passed around at the swingers party it visits and looses the cultural impact that its older brother had in the process.

I suppose that it is Bruno's goal to offend everyone at least once.  I was floored by a sequence in which mothers and fathers auditioned their babies for a photo shoot allowing them to hypothetically be exposed to a number of dangerous and evil things and I can tell you that the audience never laughed once during that stretch of the movie, the only response being a hushed, "Oh my god!" every now and again.  I'm  not counting that against the movie at all, I actually found it incredible effective and unbelievable.

Bruno is brave, outrageous, psychopathically daring, and apparently ready to do any number of insane things for a laugh.  Sacha Baron Cohen is probably the ballsiest comedian on the entire planet and the fruits of his labor, though crude and offensive to many, produce more laughs per minute than any other film in recent history.

While Bruno doesn't have the same wit or social relevance as Borat, this is still an audacious comedy and a movie that will no doubt cause many to laugh one minute and squirm uncomfortably in their seats the next.  I can only picture Cohen sitting in the back of the theater watching the reactions and smiling at a job well done.