GRIMSBY
Starring: Sacha Baron Cohen, Mark Strong, Isla Fisher, Penelope Cruz
Directed By: Louis Leterrier
Written By: Sacha Baron Cohen, Phil Johnston, Peter Baynham
Reviewed by Brendan Dousi
[rating: 2/5]

I like Sacha Baron Cohen as an actor, I really do. I think he’s a talented guy and I really would have loved to see him in a dramatic turn as Freddie Mercury in that long-rumoured Queen bio-pic. On some horrid, visceral level I have found a lot of enjoyment from his films Bruno  and Borat. His shock-comedy mixed with (supposedly) real-life situations made for some ball-bustingly funny scenes. Unfortunately, Mr. Cohen has gotten a little too famous and can no longer don a wig, put on an accent and confront people with sticks up their butts. So, he’s now left with a scripted comedy, with a proper story and everything, and it just doesn’t work very well.

The premise for Grimsby isn’t a bad one at all. Nobby (Sacha Baron Cohen), a filthy chav, tracks down and reunites with his long lost brother and secret agent Sebastian (Mark Strong) and in turn gets embroiled into a life of spying while enlisting help from his mates down at the pub. There’s a lot of potential for great humour here, but the film absolutely misses the mark. Instead of some clever observational/situation humour with a dashing of slap-stick and the tiniest sprinkle of gross-out humour, Grimsby decides it wants to completely reverse that formula. Gross-out humour, trying desperately and flailingly to disturb and shock the audience, takes the utmost forefront here. Gay jokes, AIDS jokes, fart jokes, shit jokes, bestiality jokes and a whole lot of ‘inserting things up your butt’ jokes seem to be the main items on the agenda here and the results are just baffling. Some of these managed to be a bit funny, but the majority of laughs that came out of me were ones of utter confusion as I thought, “What the hell were they thinking?”.

It’s a shame, because there were seeds of a pretty decent film here. Director Louis  Leterrier was actually able to get quite inventive with some of the action scenes which play out brutally with excellent choreography. There is a piece of spy-tech in the form of a video contact lense, which is nothing new, but it gave the filmmakers an excellent opportunity to pull off some of the best first-person fight scenes I’ve seen in a long time (Not counting the trailer for Hardcore Henry). The film even managed to be borderline emotionally touching at times, as well, by utilizing endearing flashbacks of Nobby and Sebastian as children before they were separated. There is some great stuff in here, I’m not going to lie, but unfortunately it’s sandwiched between a whole lot of garbage.

In the end, it’s actually quite impressive that all the actors involved managed to do all of that ridiculous stuff with a straight face. Sacha Baron Cohen as Nobby was quite good, and he unsurprisingly makes a fantastic chav. But, Mark Strong as Sebastian deserves some kind of Academy recognition for the crap he had to subject himself to on screen. Besides being plastered with enough make-up to try and convince us he could be younger than Sacha Baron Cohen, Strong managing to retain his stoic straight-man act while having his body defiled in numerous awful ways is truly an impressive feat to behold and only makes me like the actor further because of how much of a good sport he clearly must be in real life. The worst thing the film does, however, is make a tremendous waste of a fantastic female supporting cast who are all given very little to do. Rebel Wilson, Gabourey Sidibe, Penelope Cruz and Isla Fisher; you all deserved a lot better.

If watching Sacha Baron Cohen get slapped in the forehead by fake testicles, some decent action set-pieces and a whole lot of rectal-insertion are what you look for in your movie-going experiences then Grimsby is definitely one to put on your watch-list. For the rest of us, let’s just wait around 10 years for people to forget Sacha Baron Cohen so he can go back to donning a wig, putting on an accent and confronting people with sticks up their butts.