It can't be easy to top a previous success in comedy, and Sacha Baron Cohen has been a successful man over the years. With characters of enduring worldwide popularity like Ali G and Borat, Cohen is one of Britain's top comedy personalities, but one that also refuses to continue using the same old characters forever. Starting up another new character with that kind of expectation is a laborious task. His previous offering, The Dictator, was hilarious, but no one seems to have seen it. With the films of Cohen, everything falls on the shoulders of the character he's playing, and Admiral General Aladeen just wasn't Borat.
With The Brothers Grimsby, Cohen makes a slight departure from the styles of his earlier films, by not making his own character the be all end all focus of the narrative, but a partner in both plot and screentime with the other titular character.
Nobby Butcher is a hard drinking working class football fan from Grimsby, the arse end of the worst part of North England. He lives a happy life with his nine kids in his council flat, but still holds out a candle for his brother Sebastian, who he has been separated from for 25 years.
When Nobby gets a tip off that Sebastian has been seen by a friend attending a swanky black tie benefit party, he runs off to try and reunite with his beloved brother at any cost.
Sebastian turns out to be Britain's top spy, on a mission to stop a high profile assassination attempt, and thanks to the interference of his long lost brother, misses the shot he was aiming for, gets himself on a kill order from MI6, and sets off a chain of events that could lead to the apocalypse (and gives Harry Potter AIDS, but that's a whole different subplot)
Sebastian's character is the ideal British secret agent, suave, sophisticated, skilled. Nobby is an England fan who doesn't want to drop his pint as they run from bullet spraying bad guys. It's not hard to see where the movie goes with this dynamic. You can't say it's sophisticated humor, by any means, but it is funny, if you have the stomach for it.
The Brothers Grimsby really does push the limits of taste in every respect, and if you thought it would be tough to top the gross out sweaty naked wrestling from Borat or the sexual escapades of Bruno, you'd be very much mistaken. Some sequences you'll witness here simply can't be unseen, and you will know what an elephant gang bang looks like from the inside, and you'll have to live with that image forever. Scene by scene gets wilder and weirder, and certainly breaks the barrier of good taste in more impressive and disgusting ways than any other major motion picture you'll likely see for a long time.
The film as a whole is very very English, and some humour might get missed by foreign audiences, (Nobby himself being a grotesque effigy of Liam Gallagher) but it's often used in some pretty clever ways, and there's some solid laughs to be found specially for UK audiences, especially if you're a football fan.
The Brothers Grimsby isn't as iconic as Ali G, and it isn't as clever as Borat, and it may simply be too gross for many viewers. What it does have is some good laughs, some very en pointe modern references, shockingly brilliant action sequences that will surprise with their sheer technical execution, and a surprisingly heartfelt message in between all the arse jokes and jabs at Man U. Having as much screen time dedicated to Sebastian as well as Nobby is a wise move on Cohen's part, and the film feels more like a whole, rather than just a character piece as a result. I can't imagine the characters here will resurface at any point like Cohen's more classic incarnations, but while they're here, they're good for a laugh.
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