By Ned Jordan
In Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen attempts to recreate the success of Borat by
sticking to the same formula. This time out the fish out of water is a gay
Austrian fashion reporter instead of a Kazakhstani reporter, but the
interview-driven documentary format remains the same. The differences
between the films appear to be relatively minor but there is one big difference;
Borat is a far better film than Bruno.
Bruno starts off well enough, with Cohen getting people in the fashion
industry to let their guard down as they walk willingly into the traps he sets.
Watching a model complain about how difficult her work is and that she's in
therapy because she's too beautiful is hilarious, while watching her give words
of encouragement to kids in Africa who can't afford designer clothing is just
plain sad. When he moves on to Hollywood he does a great job of skewering
stage parents and charity consultants ("Darfive" is the next Darfur), but then
things begin to fall apart. It's as if Cohen had about twenty minutes of
material and then ran out of ideas, filling the film's remaining hour with a
series of stunts far more crude than they are funny. In Borat it was
surprising to see the level of idiocy in the people he interviewed and it was
interesting to watch Cohen subtlety set the stage for these people to make fools
of themselves. In Bruno, people react to Cohen in pretty much the way that
you would expect them to in such a situation. When he appears on a talk
show with a predominantly black audience and reveals that he has an adopted
black baby named OJ and shows off pictures of the baby at a gay hot tub orgy,
the audience reacts with shock and indignation. Well, the only surprise
here would have been if the audience was not shocked. In another scene he
is chained to his assistant on a hotel bed wearing leather fetish gear.
When he calls the front desk for help and then complains to the manager that he
accidently ordered a pay-per-view movie because the remote was stuck in his
posterior, the manager reacts quite professionally and refuses to be baited by
Cohen. In another scene, Bruno
shows a test screening panel a pilot TV show that ends with Bruno swinging his
privates around in full view. Guess what? The panel thought the show
was garbage and a woman walked out of the room. How are these reactions
supposed to be funny?
Even when he targets the same sort of people that he did in Borat, Cohen
falls miserably short. On a camping trip with a group of rednecks, the
best thing that he can come up with is to show up naked at their tents with a
handful of condoms. It doesn't take a redneck to kick someone out of their
tent under those circumstances. And in a visit to a white supremacist's
home for a faux interview, the best he can come up with is to take his pants off
and get into a yelling match with his lover. The supremacist calmly calls
911 to request that the police remove Cohen from his home. Cohen's the one
who comes out of that looking like a jerk, while the supremacist comes across as
a nice guy victim when he should have been easy pickings. If I wanted to
watch a movie that made Nazis look like nice guys, I'd be watching Triumph of
the Will instead. Thanks for the letdown, Cohen...
This release of Bruno is a rare case in which the special features outshine
the movie. The deleted scenes contain a number of scenes and interviews
conducted during the early parts of the film set in the world of fashion and
Hollywood. Some of these are genuinely humorous, and you wonder why Cohen
just didn't stick with this theme for the entire film. Also, if you're
interested in hearing how Cohen came up with some of his ideas for the film,
there's a feature on that. Lastly, you can transfer a digital copy of the
film to your PC or iPod so that you can be bored by Bruno while travelling as
well as while at home.
Final Rating:
