Text: Jeff Kaplan

Sacha Baron-Cohen has spent much of his career straddling the line between auteur and provocateur. His 2006 mockumentary Borat alternated sublimely between caustic satire and side-splitting slap stick. It was poignant commentary on the dark, ignorant underbelly of the American middle-class that was also piss-in-your-pants funny. For his latest film Bruno; Cohen has yanked another one of his beloved alter-egos out of the closet for a high-camp road trip across the United States. The question is will the same formula that turned a sexist, anti-Semite Kazakh into box office gold work the second time around? Borat was one of the funniest films of the new millennium and a comedic masterpiece. Sadly, Bruno is no Borat.

For those not acquainted with the character (he was a regular on Cohen’s bombastic TV series Da Ali G Show), Bruno is an egomaniacal, Austrian, Fashion Whore/ Television host and the limp wristed embodiment of every gay stereotype ever uttered. Bruno is gayer than a field full of prancing, rainbow unicorns, gayer than the pink, sparkly Ginch Gonch g-string you’ve got hidden at the bottom of your underwear drawer, gayer even than Clay Aiken and Ryan Seacrest snorting poppers in Perez Hilton’s Crisco filled hot tub. You get the point. The film’s premise is that after losing his TV show in Austria, Bruno and his sycophant assistant move from Vienna to Hollywood to fulfill his wildest star fucking fantasies. Hilarity and hi-jinks ensue.

Cohen uses Bruno’s over the top flamboyance to provoke outrage and homophobia in the usual crop of red necks, stage moms, politicians, religious leaders and a celebrity or two (if Paula Abdul still qualifies). Unfortunately he only hits the mark a handful of times. While the film has its fair share of laugh out loud moments and outrageous acts of daring ‘faggotry’, it fails to deliver the darkly shocking moments that made Borat so amazing. Don’t get me wrong, I love watching super slow-motion shots of jiggling penis and squirming straight men just as much as the next guy, but most of the film’s stunts came off as staged. Whereas in Borat, the American public he was lampooning were so totally clueless they shamelessly bared their willfully ignorant Kentucky fried souls, this time around many of his subjects seemed in on the joke. Given Borat’s immense success it’s not surprising that Cohen had a harder time pulling off his act, but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing.

Many have debated whether Bruno’s use of negative gay stereotypes brings the absurdity of homophobia to light or merely reinforces it. I am a firm believer that humor is one of the most powerful weapons we have against intolerance and oppression. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you’re just a sad schmuck. So in short, though it failed to live up to the expectations set by Borat, Bruno does deliver 120 minutes of in your face, oh-my-go-did-he-really-do-that, balls to the wall hilariousness. Not Sacha Baron-Cohen’s best work, but still worth seeing.