Sacha Kidder

Cohen is back with another fish-out-of-water character trying to make his way in America–this time as a 19-year-old Austrian gay fashionista who wants to become famous. But Brüno is to Borat as Thunderbird is to d’Yquem. It resembles Borat in the sense that Cohen manages to convince various people, including Ron Paul, that Brüno is real. (“He tried to put a hit on me,” Paul fumes to his aides after Cohen does a sexy dance and strips to his underwear.) But the astonishingly bold jokes about anti-Semitism and sexism in Cohen’s first film have given way to rather conventional humor about the hunger for celebrity and standard-issue dirty jokes about homosexuality.

Indeed, “dirty” is the best word to describe Brüno, which is probably the raunchiest film ever released with an R rating. There is even a scene in the film during which Brüno is actually watching as two real people have sex (their genitals are blotted out with black dots)–surely the first time such a thing has ever happened outside hard-core pornography.

Brüno has decided to go straight in order to become a star like Tom Cruise and John Travolta and gets himself invited to a swingers’ party. First, he asks one of the swingers, an anorexic tattooed redneck in his forties with a handlebar moustache, about having straight sex, and eventually goes to watch. But he can’t keep his eyes off the redneck: “You’re doing a great job,” he says, patting the man’s rear. Eventually, the redneck loses his cool and starts screaming at Brüno.

It’s hilarious, undeniably, and unlike any gag you’ve ever seen. Still, unless the scene is entirely staged, and it doesn’t feel like it is (a follow-up with Brüno and a dominatrix is clearly acted out), we are watching a sex act being performed before our eyes in a finished basement.

Earlier in the movie, we see Brüno and his beloved, whom he describes as a “midget Filipino airline pilot,” having sex every which way. This is crude as all get-out, so even though the conduct being depicted is more extreme, it doesn’t have the nightmarish kickback of the swinger sequence.

Borat was certainly ribald, with the slapstick highlight of a naked wrestling match between Borat and his sidekick that exploded outward from a hotel room to an elevator into the middle of an actual sales convention. But it was really nothing like this, and for a genuine original like Cohen, the retreat into gay sex jokes and porn humor is disappointing.

Perhaps Cohen came to understand during the making of the movie that, unlike Borat, Brüno simply isn’t an especially interesting character in his own right. (For one thing, he bears more than a passing resemblance to Mike Myers’s Dieter, the pretentious black-garbed German from Saturday Night Live who said things like “His agony was gorgeous.”) And so, to compensate for the fact that his second film features what is essentially a stock character, he decided to crank up the crudity to take the place of the originality.

Brüno almost feels like a skit on the Howard Stern radio show blown up into an 80-minute film; just as with Stern, Cohen is attempting to mine comedy from dancing all along the boundary line. (Cohen is fortunate the movie was released by a major studio that paid him $42 million for the rights to the character of Brüno, because had Brüno been made as a cheap independent film, there is no way on earth it would have earned an R rather than an NC-17.)

He may have made a wise move here. Critics like me may carp, but the teenage boys and twentysomething boy-men who are the most reliable moviegoers in America may find Brüno even more to their liking than Borat was. There’s nothing here to discomfit them; this is a movie that caters to their prejudices, rather than holding up a mirror to them. That includes much of the gay humor, which suggests that sex as performed by homosexuals is so repulsive as to be comic.

To even up the score, and to show that Cohen is on the side of the angels and opponents of Proposition 8, Brüno visits two Christian ministries dedicated to converting homosexuals to heterosexuality and makes them look ridiculous. But these scenes are basically carbon copies of similar encounters in Bill Maher’s documentary Religulous (which shares a director, Larry Charles, with Brüno). They seem to have been added merely for reasons of spin. Which, considering Cohen’s efforts to be a fearless satirist, is worthy of satire itself.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary,is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.