The Great Pretender

Brüno fails to detonate with the force of its predecessor.

by Sam Adams

HORSE PLAY: Sacha Baron Cohen gives his beloved Brüno the full-length treatment.

[ City Paper Grade: B- ]

Sacha Baron Cohen trades Borat's moustache for highlighted hair and latex pants in Brüno, a sporadically riotous but inevitably disappointing second act. A howlingly gay Austrian fashion journalist, Brüno is banished from his TV gig after a fashion-week faux pas, and like his Kazakh doppelganger sets out on a journey with one single-minded objective — although this time the only love he's pursuing is self-love. Desperate to achieve fame at any cost, he pitches an L.A. talk show, injects himself into the Mideast peace process, and even follows in Madonna's footsteps by adopting an African baby. But the movie's provocations connect only fitfully, and despite its comparatively strong narrative, it feels less of a piece than Borat, and more like an overlong episode of Cohen's TV show.

If Borat's animating force was xenophobia, Brüno's is homophobia, both expressed and otherwise. A hotel maintenance man shows palpable disgust at being summoned to unlock Brüno and his love from an elaborate bondage harness, while a martial arts instructor in Alabama happily teaches him how to break the limbs of an approaching queer. Some of his targets, like the lay minister who teaches Brüno how to "cure" his attraction to men, deserve the discomfort the movie visits upon them. (Apparently ambivalent about his desire to convert, Brüno informs him he has "great blowjob lips.") But others suffer his presence with relative good grace until Cohen pushes them into a corner — literally in the case of would-be presidential candidate Ron Paul, whom Brüno attempts to seduce by dropping trou.

Notwithstanding Cohen's obvious talents as a performer, there's only so much he can do with a character who's basically an amplified stereotype. Often, the movie's strategy is simply to take a cliché and supersize it, which gives rise to a sequence that makes Judd Apatow's fondness for dick jokes seem positively prim. Gay-bashing never truly goes out of style, but it's not nearly as volatile, or as fertile, a subject as the fear of foreigners was a half-decade after 9/11. Even the people whose stomachs are turned by Brüno's uberfag shtick have learned to bite their tongues by now.

It would be impossible for Brüno to detonate with the force of its predecessor — this time, the audience is in on the joke, rather than constantly trying to figure out how much to believe. But even accounting for diminishing returns, the movie feels loose and meandering, its encounters barely stitched together. There are plenty of inspired moments, including a climax that, perhaps inadvertently, quotes the "Homo" section of Todd Haynes' Poison, but there aren't enough to make a movie, even one that barely tops 80 minutes. Now that Cohen's out of prefab characters, he'll have to go back to the drawing board, which is just as well, since he's taken this direction about as far, and farther, than it can go.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Directed by Larry Charles, a Universal release, opens in area theaters Friday