Review: In ‘The Brothers Grimsby,’ Sacha Baron Cohen pushes crude to new levels

Sacha Baron Cohen’s humor is to show you a doughnut, eat it, then tell you where it’s been. Then maybe reveal how it wasn’t a doughnut. Whether you laugh, reel in disgust, or smile and say “Touché,” he’s got his bases covered.

While exuberant tastelessness has certainly made a place for itself at the comedy table, thanks in part to Cohen’s own oeuvre, his new “The Brothers Grimsby” spends 80 energetic minutes trying to make his nude wrestling scene in “Borat” seem as quaint as slipping on a banana peel.

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When Cohen’s on, there’s a pointed sociopolitical tinge to the crassness. But that rarely happens in “Grimsby.” It’s not unfunny in spots, but it huffs and puffs (among other bodily functions) more often than it splits the sides.

Cohen’s latest character is Nobby Butcher, a dim, beer-swilling North Londoner in a Caesar-ish mullet who’s crammed his nine kids into his dingy council flat but saved one room for the hoped-for return of the brother he lost to foster care years ago. (Grimsby is the fishing town they hail from.)

When Nobby learns Sebastian (Mark Strong) is now a black ops assassin for MI-6, and in trouble after a botched mission, he becomes the only help Sebastian’s got. It’s the sibling reunion neither expected, turning into a global pursuit to stop a nefarious plot to “cure” overpopulation by eliminating the working class.

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But to call “Grimsby” a spy spoof, or a buddy comedy, or a white-trash satire, would be to assume a tonal soundness that you wouldn’t hire a genre hack like director Louis Leterrier (“Now You See Me”) to draw out. This is the kind of anything-goes-anyplace movie in which the old suck-out-the-venom joke — re-created here with a toxin dart to Sebastian’s crotch and some vigorous porno play-acting — is just the appetizer. Again, there’s the phrase “not unfunny,” but you’d better get used to the flavor profile. After all, our heroes need to hide in an elephant later, a scene of almost towering biological ickiness.

Occasionally, there’s method to Cohen’s gross-out madness. The tossed-off jokes between bad-taste wallops tend to land better because they’re not trying so hard, like a funny bit in which Nobby recruits his hooligans-in-training kids to take on an approaching kill team by saying, “They’re Manchester United supporters.” In fact, most of the gags involving Nobby’s soccer fanaticism are amusing, and the ticking-bomb finale at a cup final in Chile includes some priceless digs at the sport’s lawlessness.

But for the most part, one sits through “Grimsby” — a far cry from the sustained brilliance of “Borat” — with a minefield suspicion that only sporadically leads to laughs. Long objects are eyed warily for expected penetration gags. One sees a terminally ill kid in a wheelchair and thinks, “Oh no.” (Oh yes.)

You worry that Gabourey Sidibe, as a South African hotel maid unwittingly caught in a seduction scenario, was hired for reasons other than being a great actress. And that’s because we’ve already met the gung-ho Rebel Wilson as Nobby’s current girlfriend, who gamely set things up earlier with jokes about her body type. (Elsewhere, Ian McShane, Ricky Tomlinson, Isla Fisher and Penelope Cruz are criminally underused, comedic or otherwise.)

And whether you laugh or not at the well-reported Donald Trump “appearance” in the film — made even funnier by the disclaimer added to the credits — it’s nothing if not a sign that Cohen will go where a lot of comedians won’t. But it makes another moment in “The Brothers Grimsby” a shock by default: Climbing into a bathtub, Cohen covers himself with his hand. The modesty is almost unintentionally hilarious.

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‘The Brothers Grimsby’

MPAA rating: R, for strong crude sexual content, graphic violence, nudity, language, and some drug use

Running time: 1 hour, 23 minutes

Playing: In general release

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