THE BROTHERS GRIMSBY REVIEWED
“The Brothers Grimsby” is an action comedy. Emphasis on the action, as veteran director Louis Leterrier shoots the living hell out of this movie. That being said, Sacha Baron Cohen plays around with the usual action claptrap while making us enjoy British chav culture. However, that’s kind of the problem of what happens in Grimsby. You have a hardcore action flick, a lower class comedy and a Cohen gross-out comedy fighting against each other for screen time. The film is ambitious, but it doesn’t have the attention span to maintain the highwire act. What is a film fan to do?
Sacha Baron Cohen still entertains, but I understand his detractors. The elephant vagina jokes and the firecracker up the ass bits are set up rather lazy. Plus, when we get to their moment in the sun, they’re not fun. Mark Strong accidentally shoots up heroin, so that Cohen can try to orally perform on an African maid. There should’ve been a healthy bit of criticism there, but I’m admiring the construction needed to make these moments work in the film. Especially since Strong shrugs off the heroin use like it was nothing. From what I can see in the deleted scenes, there was nothing there to make this scene work.
Somewhere between the second and third elephant sexual encounter, I started to see why the movie bombed. Cohen is stellar when he’s working with a live audience and the unfamiliar. It’s just that when he’s trapped into a narrative, the nature of film undermines his performance. We get that Cohen’s character is an idiot, Mark Strong is angry over his past and Rebel Wilson just wants to have dirty white trash sex. Why do we have to keep diving back into the same material over and over again? That being said, it’s a funny 2/3rds of a movie. It’s just all downhill after Ukranian Ben Affleck.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- Outtakes
- Featurette
- Blu-Ray Exclusive Blooper Reel
- Blu-Ray Exclusive Deleted & Extended Scenes
- Blu-Ray Exclusive Featurette
A/V STATS
- 2.39:1 1080p transfer
- DTS-HD 5.1 master audio track