Scraping the barrel: how ‘The Brothers Grimsby’ exhausted the comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen
Even though your parents may have claimed 2006’s Borat was too puerile for consumption, you can be sure that they would have also watched Sacha Baron Cohen’s seminal comedy on DVD shortly after you had gone to bed under the guise that it was Oscar-nominated. Influenced by the rugged, infantile nonsense of MTV’s Jackass, Cohen presented himself as an entirely new kind of cultural jester, poking and provoking members of contemporary culture with enough absurdity that the responses he got back revealed a profound truth about the turn of the new millennium.
Borat, Cohen’s vacant, moustached Kazakhstani, was not his first character, with the faux hardman of Staines, Ali G, first breaking new ground in the world of British comedy, blending the lines between scripted TV performance and real-life caricature. While 2002’s inane feature film Ali G Indahouse popularised the character across the world, it was the character’s slot on The 11 O’Clock Show that would truly carve a niche, with Cohen’s idiotic figure entering the world of reality by interviewing leading academics and politicians.
Once the ‘Chav’ stereotype overran its sell-by date, Ali G was put to one side, and Borat was given the chance to thrive himself, being promoted from being an occasional character on The 11 O’Clock Show to receiving a feature film of his own. Yet, 2006’s Borat was not a lame scripted comedy; it instead carried on the gonzo filmmaking of the TV show, with the Kazakhstani travelling to the USA as a documentarian hoping to discover the wonders of the West.
The result was undoubtedly one of the most ingenious comedies of the modern century, with the brilliance of the film coming not out of the ignorance of the title character but instead out of the expertise of Cohen himself to engineer a situation where his subject reveals the true prejudices and controversies hidden behind their eyes. Such wasn’t malicious coercion; it was candid excavation, with the absurdity of Borat being used to unearth the bigotry that exists under our own noses in reality.
In an effort to recapture this lightning in a bottle, Cohen tried again and again, with Brüno in 2009 and The Dictator in 2012, with each new film steadily becoming more scripted as he tried to duplicate the outrage of Borat, yet, aside from glimpses of the satirist that once was, nothing stuck. Relying too heavily on cheap stereotypes, Cohen had lost sight of the genius that made his comedy so sharp in the first place.
Nailing the coffin of his contemporary comedy style with a deafening thud was 2016’s The Brothers Grimsby, an action comedy in the vein of Ali G Indahouse that took a brand new character, Grimsby resident Nobby, and engaged in similar cinematic nonsense while dragging a semblance of a plot in which he joins his long-lost brother, now a spy, on an international mission. Though no different to something like 2002’s Indahouse on the surface, beneath the trailer and poster, The Brothers Grimsby was a reiteration of the kind of poverty porn stereotypes that had suffused themselves in with contemporary Britain.
Playing into the troubling idea that Grimsby is some sort of savage Wild West where the working class runs riot, Cohen’s 2016 film is about as comedically deft as a custard pie, coming off as the actor’s cheapest effort yet to make his outrageous style of comedy relevant once again. Even the film’s most memorable moment, an admittedly humorous, if utterly infantile scene where Nobby and his brother find themselves on the other end of an Elephant’s girthy willy, is partially nicked from Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, where Jim Carrey fails to stoop to the lows of using animals private parts.
It all ends with Cohen providing a half-assed attempt at giving the film some sort of moral reasoning, suggesting that such working-class communities display a togetherness that should be commended. However, such a weak comment is lost in the barrage of piss-taking that the actor has just engaged in for 90 minutes.
Aside from Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, which was a dejected return to the character who once made him great, The Brothers Grimsby remains one of Cohen’s final comedy contributions. With none of the nuance and ingenuity of his early career, the film remains a barren specimen of the actor’s own exhausted comedy competence.
