Brüno (2009)

Vassup? Ich bin tempted to write zis whole review mit ze Bruno accent, but it's not as easykrugen as it bin looken. Ich am going to sprechen sie Englisch now.

Prank-umentary (have I just coined this term?) comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, one of the funniest people in Hollywood today, brings his homsexual Austrian fashionista Bruno to the big screen. In the tradition of Borat (the abbreviated title), Bruno melds interviews gone awry with scripted narrative to give us a heartwarming (maybe) story about one man's quest to be famous. Along the way he meets Paula Abdul and attempts to seduce Ron Paul (both of whom seem oblivious to the fact that they're being goofed on), adopts an African child (with an outrageous "traditional" name), confuses Hamas with hummus, and falls for his hapless assistant Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten, who's asked to push more boundaries than Ken "Azamat" Davitian was in Borat).

It's impossible not to compare this to Borat, which as far as I'm concerned was comedic gold and possibly the funniest movie of 2006. Bruno is still very funny, but it's no Borat. For starters, Bruno places more of a premium on scripted action and gross-out sexual humor than Borat did; interview scenes and "candid camera" scenes are fewer than in Borat and often seem more contrived (an adopted African child going through baggage claim, for example). That the situations are contrived, though, isn't a total negative; some of the biggest laughs from the film come when Cohen puts himself in extremely outlandish situations - a gay deprogramming session yields perhaps the side-splittingest moment when a preacher explains why men need women (hint: surprisingly, it has nothing to do with any Biblical command). And, though Cohen does a fantastic job as Bruno, his accent slips in a few places, and he never makes the character as endearing as the naive Borat was.

Kudos to Cohen, though, for continuing to pull the wool over his "victims." After Borat, I wondered how he'd manage to go undercover again with his newfound notoriety. Chalk the film's cloaking ability to Bruno's "lesser known" status in the Cohen catalogue and to general ignorance (as well as journeying to the Ali G-less regions of the fashion world and the Middle East, here dubbed "the middle earth"), but how the heck did he fool Abdul, Paul, and a room full of CBS execs? Scripted or not, Bruno pulls off the laughs it's seeking even if it does strain a titch of credulity.

If you really have to ask, Bruno is rated "R for pervasive strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity and language." The real offender here is the sexual content, which pushes envelopes that Borat's nude wrestling scene only fanatasized about mailing. Though most of the offensive material is blacked out, the scenarios are as gross as is probably legal, with Bruno injecting himself into situations involving separately a pygmy airplane steward, a television show with a thick veneer of gay pornography, a swingers party with a particularly virulent dominatrix, and more than abundantly disturbing trysts with the less than attractive Lutz. This, combined with some narration about the acts that will make you chuckle more than cringe (the visuals take care of the latter for you), definitely isn't for the kids. Then again, the elderly couple sitting next to me seemed none too amused, for that matter.