I’m not the type of person who physically reacts to gross-out gags or shock comedy, so I’ve got to give Grimsby props for making me think: “Wow, they went THERE…” This doesn’t just apply to the scene that scarred Jimmy Kimmel’s audience. It takes the film only five minutes to drop a Cosby joke, 10 minutes to make a visual AIDs gag, and 15 minutes to kill an innocent bystander simply for a laugh. That should give you plenty to judge whether or not this is your kind of comedy, and if it is, add another star to the rating.
As a lower-class, football-loving, alcoholic father of 11 children, Sacha Baron Cohen plays the idiot Eggsy to Mark Strong’s Galahad in what could be described as Kingman re-written by a chanting, tipsy, English crowd at a FIFA match. As estranged brothers, themes surrounding economic status and family values are promoted through childhood flashbacks, but the film drags these scenes along with such disinterest, you can almost see an emergency dick joke parachuting from the sky.
At least some of the action attempts to be creative, with Baron Cohen dual-wielding pint glasses in a decent fight scene. The first-person sequences also increased my thirst for Hardcore Henry, but partly because the frenzied editing make them a slight headache to comprehend.
However, Grimsby pushes for laughs first and foremost, and its best gags are those that complement the inappropriate (like the things going into butts) with the utterly ridiculous (the physical capacities of said buttholes). But those gags aren’t plentiful, chained together by long threads of tired pop-culture references, repurposed versions of old jokes, Rebel Wilson doing her one shtick, and scenarios of misunderstanding that three Austin Powers movies ran into the ground.
Some Spy-ish Comedies Worth Watching: Spy, 22 Jump Street, The Incredibles
