It was at some point in the last scene of ‘comedy’ Grimsby that I laughed for the first time, but presumably not in a way Sacha Baron Cohen would have intended. His character, Nobby (lolz), speaks to his fellow Grimsby friends in what seems to be some kind of half-arsed attempt to make up for having re-enforced damaging working class stereotypes throughout – he proudly proclaims that they are the scum that build the hospitals and keep the Fast and Furious franchise alive. It made me nod knowingly, perhaps slightly pretentiously, as I thought back to half an hour earlier when a couple of groups of audience members laughed hysterically in reaction to Mark Strong getting spunked on by several elephants. Ironic that this film is probably appealing to the same kind of audience as Fast and Furious, films that I presume Cohen thinks are inferior to his.
Of course, each to their own. It is why this type of film keeps getting made; some people must be enjoying them , so who am I to wish away their preferred entertainment. It is just that every main humour set piece revolved around something to do with sex or shit; at one point, both. Even the climactic scene involved them having to save the day with their arseholes. I am genuinely not making this up, and I am probably making it sound funnier than it actually is. As always with Cohen’s work, it occasionally slips into a valid social commentary, with lines such as “I see why you like using guns now; it totally detaches you from the guilt of killing people” but they are passing comments, few and far between, lost in excrement and jizz.
The cast has many well known faces; from people who you may not expect much better from, such as Johnny Vegas, Rebel Wilson, and (however great he is in the right thing) Ian McShane; but when you see actors like Mark Strong acting out a scene in which he has to have poison sucked out of his testicles, and Penelope Cruz getting knocked out by a pool ball in a condom, I begin to question my sanity. Someone is wrong here, and I am pretty sure it isn’t me.
Although the gross out humour is spectacularly unfunny, it is harmless; however, the film’s depiction of the working class, the so called chav, is far from it. As mentioned in the first paragraph, there is an attempt at the end to show this Grimsby scum as somewhat noble, and all about famileh, and there are vague attempts to show the snobbiness of the middle and upper classes. However, it is too late by that point; Cohen and his fellow writers Phil Johnston and Peter Baynham have already committed that same snobbiness themselves. The working class, and the whole of Grimsby it seems, are shown as kebab and beer consuming, fat, benefit scrounging, messy, stupid, over breeding, violent, thieving football hooligans. It was like an 83 minute advert for a Tory election campaign.
So, in conclusion, if the above actually sounds like something you’d find hilarious, go for it; I will judge, but it is a (reasonably) free country, it is up to you. All I am saying is that there aren’t many films that make me want to self-waterboard, but Grimsby was certainly one of them.
Grimsby is on general release now.
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