Bruno

Review by Loc

A couple years ago, Borat-mania took the nation by storm. If you count the number to bad impressions and “I LIKE” utterings, you would be nearing the number of Big Mac’s sold. I don’t know where I got that comparison, it sucked, and I apologize. However, Borat’s success we get more Sasha Baron Cohen doing mockumentaries, good for all. Right? Quick hit: good enough, I guess.

People tend to forget, but Borat, Bruno, all this stuff was borne out of one Ali G. As the host of a fake talk show, Cohen set up shop as Ali G, a hip-hop, completely moronic talk show host famous for lambasting unsuspecting victims in overly ironic, satirical interviews. From this show, Cohen brought two more characters to life, Borat, who all now know and love, and Bruno, who we’re about to get to know better.
So, Bruno steps up like its Borat-predecessor, a fake documentary with a paper-thin “plot” aimed to put our title character into awkwardly funny situations. Again, like Borat, Bruno probably would have benefitted from dropping the entire plot, and just presenting people getting embarrassed by a flamboyantly gay, Austrian talk-show host. But whatever, we still get to the funny scenes even if they’re bracketed by fake plotting.

How’s the character, can Bruno carry a movie? Um, kind of. He’s a pretty flat character, a riff on gay stereotypes, with maybe a bit more mischievous, more evil-than-not intentions. It’s hard to argue that Borat is a multi-layered caricature, but relatively speaking, Borat offered more innocent ignorance that was easier to get behind. Bruno is a reflection of the self-involved, self-important, celebrity-hungry non-celebrities that we get a daily dose of everyday in tabloids and TMZ. We don’t cheer for them in real life, and it’s harder to get behind Bruno in the same vein.

The comedy is pretty good. Unfortunately, and not necessarily surprisingly, you’ve seen the best bits in the trailers already. Sure, scenes are built out a little further, but if you like the hunters camping gag, or the army training goof, then you’ve already seen the punchlines. There are some new pieces that they seemed to have saved for the flick, but for the most part, they’ve already showed you most of the good stuff. One thing that was fun: Celine Dion song, good use of Titanic.

The outrageous can be on the extreme side. There’s some graphic stuff going on in the first three minutes of the flick, imagine Austin Power without the well-placed fruit or shadows. There’s also quite an extended scene of gyrating penis, which is strange that it passed the censors. Add in a swingers party with not-great-looking people, and you get your fill of bad Skinamax for a while.

In the end, Bruno was more of a condemnation of the Southern hicks than it was of anything else. It makes sense, since a gay Austrian character is likely to get the most bang for his buck out of the ultra-conservative Bible Belters. It’s not necessarily hilarious, but some of it is chuckle-worthy.

Overall, Bruno is entertaining enough. It’s not great, it doesn’t make you roll on the floor and bend over in laugh-filled pain. But it keeps you chuckling and squinting in awkward voyeurism as Bruno pushes the envelope. Out of 100 references to some type of phallic device, Bruno hits the head with 60. It’s decent, hello.