CHICAGO - MOVIE REVIEWS BRÜNO

MOVIE REVIEWS BRÜNO

Talk about "mixed reviews!" Not only do those for Brüno from the major critic range from disgusted scorn to ecstatic praise but those sentiments can sometimes be found in individual reviews. For example, take Roger Ebert's in the Chicago Sun-Times "The needle on my internal Laugh Meter went haywire, bouncing among hilarity, appreciation, shock, admiration, disgust, disbelief and appalled incredulity." Ebert awards the film 3 1/2 stars. In the same paragraph, A.O. Scott in the New York Times praises Baron Cohen as "a brilliant slapstick artist and a master of voices," then concludes that the movie "is a lazy piece of work that panders more than it provokes." Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel calls it a "miss-or-hit mockumentary." Claudia Puig in USA Today predicts "You'll cringe and watch through splayed fingers, but mostly you'll laugh." Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer admits that some of the movie's scenes triggered a gag reflex. "I sincerely can't tell you whether I was choking with laughter or keeping from choking." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post lauds it for being "more gut-bustingly funny than anything else out there right now," but "for all the laughs -- and they are many -- there's a certain been-there, done that feeling to Brüno ." Jason Anderson in the Toronto Star makes this odd assessment "Yeah, the movie's funny. Sometimes it's very funny. But when the biggest celebrities who get punked by Brüno are Paula Abdul and Ron Paul, something's gone wrong." Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times remarks that Baron-Cohen appears to be one part Lenny Bruce and an equal part The Three Stooges. She concludes "With Bruce there was always a biting moral to the story. With Larry, Curly and Moe, the message was delivered with a bruising bop on the head. Brüno is easy to dismiss as salacious comedy on the cheap, and at times that's what it feels like. But in a world where mercy is a celebrity adoption and the only pain an adulterous governor feels is his own ('Do Cry for Me Argentina'?), Baron Cohen's instincts for outrage are spot on. It's not insight we need at all right now, but a very sharp bonk on the head."

10/07/2009