Bruno (2009)

VERDICT:
8/10 Talking Penises

Not as good as Borat, but freakin’ hilarious all the same.

Bruno is about Sacha Baron Cohen parading around the world, posing as a 19-year-old, flamboyantly gay, Austrian male model/fashionista that gets blacklisted from the fashion world and must find a way to get back into the public eye. It’s more or less the same story as Borat, only this time Borat is gay.

In one sense, the whole feeling that you’ve seen this before could be considered a drawback, but considering how damn good Borat was, it probably wasn’t such a bad call to stick with a winning formula. The movie really just ends up being a vehicle for Bruno to make everyone he comes in contact with as horribly uncomfortable as humanly possible. And considering that Sacha Baron Cohen obviously has no shame whatsoever, things get really, really awkward.

Before the movie started, I received a text message from a friend of mine informing me that he “Just saw Bruno. Can’t believe that it was rated R.” Consider this review a reiteration of that statement. If you thought Borat was pushing the envelope, dear lord…

I’m tempted to go ahead and list some of the bizarro shit that goes on in this movie, but since I had to go through it blind (and laugh my ass off as a result), I’d only be ruining it for you if you didn’t go into it the same way. In short, there’s a lot of “dude-ity” (see what I did there?) and if sitting through Milk or Brokeback Mountain was a little much, you might just want to go see Up instead.

My one complaint with Bruno is that it doesn’t really work as a social commentary against homophobia in the way that Borat worked as a big “fuck you” to ignorant Southern racists and drunk college kids with mean prejudices towards women. The problem is that while Bruno puts a lot of people on the spot and makes them visibly shudder with his wildly open displays of homosexuality, he doesn’t really go after the right people. Anyone, gay or straight, would be uncomfortable if they were forced to watch male genitalia flopping around in their faces…and then have to react when the penis starts talking.

It works at times because it’s not Baron Cohen that needs to be shocking to get that result, it’s when everyone else starts flaunting their prejudices that makes everyone in the theater gasp (ie: that racist bastard from the rodeo who told Borat to shave off his terrorist mustache). If he targeted more people on the other end of the spectrum, like some serious homophobes that are damn proud of their homophobic beliefs, the final product would have been much more effective.

So it might not be as good as Borat and it doesn’t really work all that well as a social commentary, but then again, I’m still laughing to myself to the point where I’m short of breath just by replaying scenes from this movie in my head. I took me like an hour to go to sleep last night just because I couldn’t stop laughing. The only other movie I can fathom being anywhere near as funny as this might be Funny People, but that’s a whole different kind of humor anyway.

If you’ve got strong nerves and you liked Borat, you won’t be disappointed with Bruno. I just hope to God people aren’t gonna be quoting this thing for the next four months.