Grimsby

Synopsis: After a 28 year hiatus, Nobby (Sacha Baron Cohen), a likeable soccer-mad dimwit with 11 children reunites with his long-lost brother, Sebastian (Mark Strong), a deadly MI6 agent and together they prevent a massive global terror attack.

In terms of comedic style Sacha Baron Cohen’s film is very much the trans-Atlantic cousin to Dirty Grandpa. It’s a concatenation of potty jokes that manages to outdo that film in sheer juvenile smuttiness while broadly spoofing the action spy thriller.  It’s entirely worthless but it is also at times very funny.

As we know, Cohen has a real flair for offending propriety. In his latest effort sometimes this works, most notably in the case of an outrageously ridiculous scene involving him and his co-star Mark Strong in an instance of “elephant bukkake”. Sometimes it does not, as in the case of a gag involving Daniel Radcliffe contracting AIDS. In between there are: some clever lines and some dud ones. Pop cultural references to LinkedIn and Strong’s bald head belong to the former category, a turd blocking a toilet bowl and Gabourey Sidibe as a seriously overweight housemaid, to the latter. 

The opening hi-octane action sequence is amusing (director Louis Leterrier directed the original Transporter film and knows every cliché of the genre) but the periodic returns to action set-pieces are less than thrilling.  And whilst Cohen knows how to play the fool and Strong bravely subjects himself to no end of indignities, there’s the dreadful Rebel Wilson, relatively featureless support players such as Ian McShane, Isla Fisher and Penélope Cruz (Fisher is Cohen's wife but why Cruz signed on is a mystery) and a generic crowd of slovenly English lumpenproletariat to which the film has a very ambivalent attitude. In other words it’s a scrappy affair.

Cohen’s place in film comedy is guaranteed by Ali G and Borat. Nobby, like The Dictator, will soon be forgotten but if you want to laugh hard for a little while at some unspeakable filth it should do the trick.

Want more about this film?

Want something different?