Bruno

Let’s make one thing clear before we start: Bruno is no Borat. If you’re hoping for something that is hilariously funny while making social commentary, you’re going to leave disappointed. If you’re hoping for a movie that delivers on the premise of tricking real people, you’re also going to be disappointed. If you’re hoping for a flamboyantly gay man dancing, getting his anus bleached, and engaging in extremely graphic gay sex, they’re might be something wrong with you, but you’ll enjoy this movie.

I’m not going to waste time talking about this movie as a straight up comedy. Anyone who wants to view it as that can stop reading here. There are funny moments. You’ll laugh. I want to examine why this movie fails in every way that Borat triumphed, and why it fails to deliver on the premise that every Sacha Baron Cohen character has had since Da Ali G Show.

The best parts of Cohen’s humor has been his interviews and what he is able to get people to say during them. By creating these characters, he is able to disarm his guests and trick them into revealing things they never would normally. In Borat, he uses the fact that his character is not from our country to show people’s reactions to foreigners and expose a level of xenophobia in America. What really works in these interviews are that they feel real. For all I know, everything could be scripted, and that’s one of the problems with this style of humor. We don’t know what’s real and what’s not. Borat works because most of it feels real. We are seeing real people making fools of themselves and we love it. It’s like a car crash that you can’t look away from. I think the best moments in Borat aren’t the ones where I laugh, but the ones where I cringe uncomfortably because I’m watching someone real humiliate themselves. There are only a few scenes in Borat that really feel scripted, notably the Pamela Anderson scene.

With Bruno, the majority of the movie feels like one big Pamela Anderson scene. Again, I don’t know how much of the movie is scripted and how much isn’t, but if the entire thing (a few scenes excluded) feel scripted, that’s what really counts. Cohen and his writers seem to think that people loved the previously mentioned naked wrestling thing so much that they should give the audience more material like that. There are too many times that the movie comes to the line and crosses it just for the sake of crossing it. Cohen should have been spending more time doing interviews with real people, instead of doing set pieces involving the dildo machine for the tenth time.

The most frustrating part is that there are some really great moments. The few times that the film seems unscripted are absolutely fantastic and everything that was promised to us. He succeeds in eliciting cringes from the audience by getting the interviewers to say and do some unbelievable things. One scene in which Bruno is interviewing parents for a baby photo shoot could be some of the best work Cohen has ever done. Sadly, these scenes are too few and far between. It’s also tough to show people’s prejudices when you create a character that is so annoying, stupid, and unrealistic that even his mother would be put off by him. At least Borat had some redeeming qualities. Anyone who hates or is rude to Bruno doesn’t feel that way because he’s gay. They feel that way because he’s an asshole.

It may sound silly to criticize the plot in a movie like this, but we deserve more than just a guy trying to be famous. At least in Borat we were given both the guise of him going to America to learn things for his country and the “love story” with Pamela. Here, we’re given nothing. Absolutely nothing. The attempts at plot and character development are so lazily done it seems like they came up with it minutes before shooting.

Bruno may succeed at making you laugh, but it is nothing more than a dumbvery dumb comedy masquerading as a social commentary. So, keep Bruno in the ghetto or put him on a train to Auschwitz? Back to Auschwitz!