The Brothers Grimsby (Louis Leterrier)

[Henry Gale]

IMDb (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3381008/) / Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimsby_(film))

http://cdn.traileraddict.com/content/columbia-pictures/grimsby-poster.jpg

[Henry Gale]

Just gonna jot some thoughts since I'm not sure how much necessary critique this actually needs, since a lot of its issues go hand in hand with the most intentional bad taste and abrasiveness that it mainly just doesn't know how to pull off.

- Da Ali G Show is probably one of my favourite comedy vehicles ever (FX's Rezurection series showed me just how much I knew certain segments by heart), I loved Borat (though it has been a bunch of years since I've seen it, and the undesirable over-quote factor might make much of it inert by now), I really enjoyed Brüno when I saw it in theatres despite it clearly being less nuanced and obviously inferior to what came before, and I even kinda like The Dictator. This is the worst thing he's ever had a creative hand by a good margin (though I have blocked out much of Ali G Indahouse from my memory).

- To call the movie stupid isn't inherently a knock towards it because it's so knowingly silly, but what I mean is how wrongheaded, tonally incongruous and often ill-conceived it feels. Baron Cohen's Nobby just isn't much of an on-screen entity as just someone who haplessly and passively finds himself obliviously at the center of every situation. He says and does dumb things, loves football, love his family (especially his long lost brother), and.. that's about it. At least his other creations have had some sort of provocative, social commentary design to them, providing a one-dimensional representation of a stereotype to allow the characters (or real life people) to provide the story from there. And since he really doesn't ever feel like a fully realized person with an arc that feels like it needs to be fulfilled, the movie just eventually decides to give his character darker and darker habits towards the end, with an end-credits sequence taking it as far as it can for one final, fairly cheap laugh.

- Louis Leterrier clearly isn't much of a comedy director, but you wouldn't even think he'd directed even somewhat competent action movies in the past from how he shoots and edits things here. That first POV sequence prominently shown in the trailers is basically incomprehensible, with jump cuts in between basic actions for no reason other than insane self-consciousness about its pace or that maybe they didn't actually shoot in single choreographed takes and just spliced together bit by bit. Also there is very odd employment of dramatic pathos through flashbacks that a smartly-assembled comedy would find a way to play for laughs, but this movie seems to juggle dead seriously with the dumbest moments with an insane dissonance.

- If for some reason anyone is dying to know what that overly obscene scene Baron Cohen showed only to Kimmel's studio audience is all about (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wP_9wGAdrNQ), it might be odd to say that as much as I did let out a few laughs out of slight disbelief, the only thing I could muster amongst the audience's mildly delirious coming-down from it was shaking my head and going "Why." They hide in an elephants vagina (because they happened to see a Nat Geo show talking about how much it can expand earlier on in the movie), and while in there they are unexpectedly fucked by not one but two elephants and their massive penises, both of which ejaculate comical(!) amounts onto them, the second one into Cohen's character's accidentally exposed ass.

Humour!



- Cosby and Trump jokes. (The first done with a cutaway to a poster and a superimposed head, so maybe they'll be different references in the UK and wherever else in the world?) Trump getting AIDS after another character's blood gets in his mouth functioning as a comeuppance is already a problematic enough idea alone, but nothing in the movie really bothers to work him into anything else before that moment, so we gotta agree with the premise audience to make it work at all??

- If you like idea of Isla Fisher, Ian McShane, Penelope Cruz starring in a movie, but would prefer them to be horribly squandered and play characters that barely contribute anything to a film, this is the movie for you! David Harewood is also in this (and in the opening cast credits), for all of one, barely on-camera line of dialogue. Tamsin Egerton is seen slightly more, but says even less. And to think Fisher slept with Baron Cohen for all these years to get this role! (Bad joke? Very likely. In line with this movie's standards? Nope, classier.)

The biggest problem is that it's not an entirely laughless movie, which makes it even more disappointing when it's laughs-per-minute attempts go in such scattered and underwhelming fits. The opening scene is funny. A scene involving Nobby mistaking a villain-sent seductress for a maid is written with an actual premise and back and forth dialogue that progresses a building joke! (It's not great, but it's something that feels like it's from a real life movie comedy!) There are running jokes that feel decent on paper that just didn't pan out on screen.

And there is some very late attempts at injecting the movie with some sort of social commentary involving the villain looking to kill the world's lower class system by unleashing a virus at a World Cup of sorts to spread across the globe to other football hooligans and those they live around and breed in ways that directly contribute overpopulation(??.. Idiocracy did it better..) that results in Nobby rallying together his group of local friends and family with an "inspiring" speech that makes the points that the world needs the lower class to build building like hospitals and fight in wars for those in power. But the whole thing feels like too little too late, and ultimately plays like a more inert version of the "Imagine if America was a dictatorship" speech (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUSiCEx3e-0) from his last movie.

As much as I would normally hope Baron Cohen would focus on writing new things on his own on a large scale (Baron Cohen and Edgar Wright's frequent producer Nira Park are the lead producers here, but there are no less than ten credited Executive Producers including Adam McKay, implying some creative discrepancies along the way) instead of showing up as something of a distraction in other people's movies, I'm now in a tough spot of now feeling like sticking to endorsing that when ends up being something like The Brothers Grimsby.

EDIT: Wow. I intended this to be a short post....

[Pop Trash]

Sight & Sound, who are admittedly pretty high-brow, called it "witless."

[Henry Gale]

Sight & Sound, who are admittedly pretty high-brow, called it "witless."

A much more succinct way of putting it.

When it is mildly funny, it almost feels like it's by accident (despite the talent involved), or that Baron Cohen, in his years-long editing of this (he apparently had final cut rights, and the movie was filmed in mid-2014) just found ways to reverse-engineer inert scenes to a decent point and or had (dull) lightbulb moments long the way to add/refine jokes after simply living with it for so long. But even then, the movie is exhaustingly fast-paced with no room to breathe between beats, as if it doesn't expect laughs for it to hold for them.