Jack loves cringe movies but even he was taken aback at some of the raunchy gags in this action farce about two reunited brothers, one a spy/assassin and the other a soccer hooligan buffoon. That said, we laughed and groaned at co-writer/star Sacha Baron Cohen's (the buffoon) nasty antics.
Remember last week when I said Tangerine was filthy? This makes Tangerine look like Ozzie and Harriet. When I covered Cohen's Brüno, I wrote, "The envelope is torn now," but this surpasses any filth that I've ever seen, with the camera lingering on the worst of them. As the brother, Mark Strong (most recently in Kingsmen: The Secret Service) is a good sport. And Cohen (last blogged for his comic relief in Les Miserables) does not save the most humiliating parts for himself.
Rebel Wilson (last in these pages for Pitch Perfect) puts her comedy chops to good use as Cohen's wife, and Cohen's wife in real life, Isla Fisher (most recently in Now You See Me) plays it entirely straight as Strong's love interest, as do Penelope Cruz (last in I'm So Excited) and Gabourey Sidibe (last in Seven Psychopaths) in a cameo. Daniel Radcliffe (Kill Your Darlings) has a funny bit as well.
Director Louis Leterrier (most recently helmed Now You See Me) uses the action skills he demonstrated in The Incredible Hulk (2008) and others to keep this going, except when he doesn't. The writing is credited to Cohen with Phil Johnston (he wrote two huge animated hits that we didn't see, Wreck-It Ralph and Zootopia, after his feature debut, a very funny Cedar Rapids) and Peter Baynham, who, along with Cohen and others, was nominated for an Oscar and a Writers Guild award for writing Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), among his other work.
The editing, particularly on the opening sequence, is remarkable, like a video game or virtual reality, and it, like most of the movie, will induce MPMS (motion picture motion sickness--see the running list here), so my fellow sufferers should sit in the back row.
Cohen's brother Erran Baron Cohen (covered in some detail in The Dictator) and David Buckley (collaborated on the soundtrack to The Town) are credited with the score. I don't really remember it from nine days ago but here's one track and a list of songs.
We ended up seeing this after I listened to Marc Maron's podcast with Sacha (the podcast is quite long and took me several sessions to finish it--I like the Podcast app on the iPhone).
Grimsby is a real town, voted the worst place to live in England in 2016, on the east coast, and this movie does much to sustain that image.
If puerile, explicit sex jokes sicken you, stay far away. It's surprising that this is rated only R. It may be best for certain boys 18-25, Sacha Baron Cohen fans, and the most open minded of the rest of us. Critics on Rotten Tomatoes average 38% and audiences (self selected, no doubt) a resounding 54. Nonetheless, it was ninth at the box office last week and is returning tomorrow for another week in these parts.
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