Grimsby (AKA The Brothers Grimsby)

Dir: Louis Leterrier

2016

**

Shock comedy has its place, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but it will never appeal to everyone, a great number of people in reality. It can only go so far. Great jokes work because of their surprise, if you can guess what the punchline is going to be before the joke teller gets to it then the chances are you're not going to laugh. The surprise can be achieved in many different ways, but generally it works best when the audience is lead one way and then taken another, sometimes abruptly. A shock is a surprise and when you know you are being told a joke you are more susceptible to it and you laugh, even when the joke really isn't funny. When done well there is no immunity and Sacha Baron Cohen has become quite the expert in this particular field and he has told some brilliant jokes. Many of his tricks work well because he sends himself up, you can forgive him, and on the occasion that he sends other people up, it's people who usually had it coming. His interviews are mostly little masterstrokes of genius, although he has performed a few bad ones. As Ali G he sent up an image, an ideology and various political people who could either take it and go along with it or who really deserved it. As Borat he attacked prejudice and xenophobia, a little bit like how Chaplin did in The Dictator, although his later film called The Dictator fell flat, he didn't quite manage the same effect, missing the point that he had essentially already covered it. I thought Bruno was fairly underrated, it was a brilliant mocking of homophobia and how it has infected the media and society in general but the big problem was that he targeted a lot of the wrong people. Grimsby is a totally different kettle of fish, it sends up a movie genre and people from the North of England, without a real reason why. Sacha Baron Cohen's character is a strange mix of mid-nineties 'lad' and football fanatic but could be from anywhere. The North/South divide in Britain isn't as much as a thing as it used to be but this film won't help it any. Cohen's accent is terrible and kicking Grimsby is pretty below the belt. Casting an array of England's favourite 'Northerners' such as Ricky Tomlinson, John Thomson and Johnny Vegas will annoy many too seeing as they are all from Lancashire not Lincolnshire, the opposite side of the country.  Many would say this was a typical mistake of a southerner, and with embarrassment I'd have to agree.  Done on purpose? Was it hell! The spy genre has also been spoofed to death, there really isn't anywhere to go on this and Grimsby seems a little lazy with its brothers separated story line. I can see why Louis Leterrier was chosen as director given his action credentials but in all honesty the film really didn't the action sequences or glamorous locations, indeed, faking it could have been funnier. Grimsby really doesn't have anything to do with it and while I would argue that only someone from the UK would understand it, there really isn't anything to understand and it gets it wrong anyway (the film is called The Brothers Grimsby, which is fairly misleading and clearly a reflection on how it has been misunderstood). The jokes are fairly predictable and mostly unfunny. Sacha Baron Cohen sucking on one of Mark Strong's testicles isn't something you see every day but it is humour/shock humour at its most basic. However, the film's funniest sketch in my opinion is also pretty basic, when the act of oral sex is mistaken for the offer of unblocking a toilet. The difference between the two scenes was subtlety, something Cohen can do brilliantly but so rarely does. For me, Grimsby seems to have made/written/rushed all for one particular scene. It's a shocker and maybe the most original idea to ever appear in a film but I'm not sure it carries the rest of the film. I wonder if Mark Strong, when nominated for the prestigious Laurence Olivier Award in 2003 for his performance in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, would could ever imagine that thirteen years later, he'd star in a scene where he would have to lay in an Elephants vagina, while another Elephant entered it, covering him head to toe in seamen. It isn't without its moments but overall, not something I enjoyed or would ever watch again.