Your love, hate or difference for Sacha Baron Cohen's Brüno will depend largely on how you responded to his previous film, Borat. In other words, if you enjoy Cohen's particular brand of anecdotal, partially improvised, faux-documentary shock comedy, what you'll find here is more of the same.
Or rather, slightly less of the same. Because this time around, Cohen -- playing a dim-witted gay Austrian fashion reporter on a quest for fame in the U.S. -- seems less invested in pulling the covers off of American stupidity as he is in simply wringing more of the same sorts of laughs and box office dollars out of similar material, with decidedly mixed success.
Like Borat, the film's a loosely strung together series of sketches connected by the flimsy premise, and some of them are, indeed, very funny. Brüno appears on the Richard Bey talk show in a segment on single fathers, and incites outrage from the largely black audience when he introduces his newly acquired African baby, whom he says he traded for an iPod. And a segment in which he interviews actual stage mothers about the things they would allow their small children to be exposed to -- bees, industrial waste, rapid weight-loss diets -- in order to get them a showbiz job is both hilarious and horrifying, because these parents are genuinely horrible.
The problem is that not all of Cohen's victims are as deserving of his pranking. Yes, it's deeply satisfying when he interviews an obviously closeted reverend who runs a "gay conversion" service. But the deep-South hunters who take Brüno on a camping trip and are set up to appear homophobic because they reject his weird, naked attempts to climb in their tents with them? They may not be homophobes at all, just straight and not interested. But -- ha ha! -- it's fun to laugh at the rednecks!
Cohen (and director Larry Charles) are to be congratulated on blazing something of a new trail in both Borat and Bruno, creating a style of uncomfortable confrontation comedy that's relatively unique. But as funny as much of it is, Brüno feels incredibly shallow, never extending a sequence long enough to explore the concepts it introduces, always satisfied with getting a cheap laugh before zipping along to the next set piece.
That said, those cheap laughs are abundant. For audiences who can handle nudity, crude sexuality, and the humiliation of innocent bystanders, Brüno is a very funny movie indeed. But it's a funny movie that pretends, with its visits to the Middle East and lampooning of right-wing heterosexual Christian paranoia, to be about something, yet it's not really about anything at all.
Ultimately, Brüno fails in the very ways that Borat succeeded -- as social satire. Just watching a silly man make a fool of himself (and certain deserving others) is good for a giggle, but without any substance behind it, it's a weak effort.