Brüno Review

There is a scene in Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen's follow-up to Borat, where a mother agrees to put her baby into a photo shoot even though she has to agree that the child appear dressed as a Nazi pushing other babies dressed as Jews into an oven. Sacha Baron Cohen realises that this woman, with tears in her eyes, is agreeing to his outrageous requests because she is desperate, and he is riding her desperation as far as it will take him. His grin is as wide and lethal as a Samurai sword.

Brüno is at its best during the gleeful exploitation of the powerless, the evil moments when the audience vaguely apprehends the awkward dynamic of braying at the ignorance and anger of frankly damaged people. Sacha Baron Cohen doesn't have the morality of the situation all worked out in advance. You sense that the purity of the intervention of his characters into the real world is his main concern. How the moral chips fall is down to chance, and that is the delirious risk in this kind of comedy, though following the death of Michael Jackson a fortnight before the film's release, a scene featuring Latoya Jackson was cut.

Like Borat, Brüno is an invention from 'Da Ali G Show' from way back when. The ultra-gay Aryan presenter of 'Funkyzeit', Brüno is rejected from the fashion world after an unfortunate incident with a Velcro suit. Like Borat, he embarks upon a road trip through America in search of fame, rubbing his crotch in the faces of the deluded and the daft: shocking hotel staff, unveiling an adopted African orphan to the black audience of a TV show and flipping his member in the faces of a focus group who look like life has not spared them a single blow.