Review - Bruno

When I entered the theater to see “Bruno,” I should have known what I was getting myself into—I should have. I expected “Bruno” to be 90 minutes of Sacha Baron Cohen doing his best to make people uncomfortable around a gay foreigner. You know, like Tom Green. It’s shock humor: you’re scared what he might say or do next and shocked when he does it. What I didn’t realize is how far he’d have to go to shock an audience in 2009.

It was a midnight opening show (12:05am to be exact), the theater was sold out, and I’m pretty sure I was the only person in the room of legal drinking age. Most of the attendees weren’t even old enough to see a Rated R movie when “Borat,” Sacha Baron Cohen’s last film, hit theaters in 2006. Regardless, the MTV youth are coming out in droves to see “Bruno.” Two midnight showings were sold out here. That’s less than the close to 10 for the “Transformers 2” opening, but there were no fighting talking robots, so it’s understandable.

I guess Cohen knows that these kids have grown up seeing everything. The movie is full of jokes involving dildos, assholes, dildos going into assholes, and dicks that swinging around and doing tricks. Oh, and since “Bruno” is an Austrian character, there are a bunch of Hitler and Jew burning jokes too. It’s remarkable to watch how far an R rating will get you. The MPAA originally gave “Bruno” an NC-17 (box-office death) rating, forcing Cohen to re-cut the movie and remove some crudeness. I can only imagine what didn’t make it into the movie, though I’m sure it will pop up in the UNRATED DVD later this year. (There was also a LaToya Jackson joke that was cut out after Michael Jackson’s death a couple weeks ago.)

After the huge success of “Borat,” Sacha Baron Cohen must have a difficult time finding anyone who doesn’t recognize him or his characters. Tom Green had the same problem when his show (The Tom Green Show) became huge in the late 1990s. His solution: go to different countries, find even more out-of-touch hillbilly rednecks, and target really old people. Cohen does much of the same. He spends the later half of “Bruno” in rural Alabama, where he tries to weird out Christians, hunters, the elderly, and Ultimate Fighting fans. Sound familiar? He kind of did the same thing at the end of “Borat.” Making fun of the hypocrisy of redneck southern folk is a recurring Cohen theme.

All that is good fun. Go for it and weird people out. It’s entertaining. My issue with “Bruno” is that a lot of the movie looks staged. Was that talk show Bruno goes on real, or just made up to look like Jerry Springer? As out of it as she is, would Paula Abdul really sit on the backs of migrant workers during an interview about how selfless and giving she is? It’s hard to say.

I don’t know how much of “Bruno” is fake/staged, but it’s a large percentage. That army scene is completely fake, with Cohen even cracking a smile in one shot. But does it matter? Probably not. Either you’re willing to go along with the joke or you’re not. I got it and laughed quite a bit. When I left the theater, however, and the roar of the hundreds of adolescent teens died down, a little of the magic wore off. “Bruno” was hilarious and shocking, but I won’t be clamoring to see it again.

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