BRUNO: Borat-lite

BRUNO arrived at cinemas across the States this weekend riding a tidal wave of pre-release hype. As the sequel - in a manner of speaking - to 2006's "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" an awful lot is expected of the film and if the publicity is to be believed BRUNO more than delivers.
Well, don't believe the hype. If we're talking about delivery BRUNO is more USPS First Class Mail than FedEx Sameday.
Where "Borat" made merciless fun of American ignorance and gullibility, BRUNO exposes the nation's not-so-latent homophobia, but while "Borat" was laugh out loud funny BRUNO is only intermittently amusing.
Both films share a similar initial premise. Where Borat was a tv journalist who traveled to the USA with his director to discover more about the USA, BRUNO is an extravagantly gay Austrian fashionista and tv host who heads to America with a faithful sidekick to find celebrities to appear on his show and become internationally famous himself.
But maybe because "Borat" made even semi-right thinking American celebs wary of going anywhere near a foreigner with a weird accent and a tv camera, the best BRUNO can come up with is Paula Abdul and Republican Congressman Ron Paul. And even they cotton on very fast and scarper.
Their fleeting appearances encapsulate what's wrong with this film. Everything moves too fast, and too many scenarios are discarded without being properly explored. At times it's like watching sketch comedy rather than a full-blown comedy story. An air of desperation creeps in when BRUNO makes a detour to the Middle East (or "Middle Earth" as he calls it) in a bid to find fame by bringing peace to the region. The sequence where he brings Arab and Israeli leaders together to try and make them make friends left me feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable because it was so painfully unfunny.
The speed with which so many of the sequences are despatched leads me to suspect that either the victims caught on to what he was up to or just failed to adequately incriminate themselves to provide much good footage. There are a couple of exceptions, notably the greedy parents willing to put their toddler kids through any danger for a chance to grab the slippery ring of fame, and the 3 good ol' boys from Alabama who take BRUNO hunting and don't take kindly to being compared to the 4 girls from "Sex and the City."
I also suspect that not all of the set-ups are genuine. While it's true that Baron Cohen is fully prepared to put himself in genuine physical danger to make a scene work there are also some situations which feel more staged than spontaneous.
While BRUNO makes it easy for us to be shocked and disgusted by the casual homophobia displayed by so many, one also has to wonder how we would react when confronted by such a prancing in-your-face, sex obsessed gay stereotype who is so determined to offend and outrage rather than simply celebrate who he is.