AFTER Sacha Baron Cohen's success with Borat, the big question was whether he could still find people to dupe. Certainly it seemed unlikely that anyone would ever again grant an interview to a blissfully racist, misogynist Kazakh TV reporter without
first checking they haven't offended their agent.
The solution Cohen and his co-creators have arrived at is Bruno, a gay Austrian style guru who is really just Borat after a wash, shave and sexual repositioning. Like Borat, Bruno has a funny accent, a quirky wardrobe and a faux-naif interview style. On Cohen's Ali G TV show I once saw him quizzing a Southern Baptist minister who specialised in "converting" gays to straight Christian life: "Can I still hug men? Can I still watch Will And Grace? What about eating brunch? Being fabulous?"
The new movie merely expands his life story a little. In Austria Bruno is the host of Funkyzeit, a show where the terminally hip give out snap judgments on what's hot ("chlamydia) and what's not ("autism"). But his career goes pearshaped after a clash between his limited edition Velcro suit and the contents of the Milan Fashion Week, leaving Bruno attempting to stride the catwalk looking like a ball of laundry. Dumped by the show, his boyfriend and fashionista pals, Bruno heads for Los Angeles where he aims to become "the biggest Austrian superstar since Hitler".
What follows is a series of episodic, partly-improvised events conceived and written by Cohen and three other writers. Bruno meets another religious minister who is supposed to re-align his sexuality, and this time he compliments him on his "blow job lips". Later he flirts a little more heavily with Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, by lighting some incense and dropping his trousers.
What's astonishing about Sacha Baron Cohen is not so much how outrageous the comedian himself is, but the reactions he elicits from his unsuspecting targets. When he auditions stage-show kids, he asks a mother if he can dress her son as a Nazi pushing a Jewish baby into an oven. "That's fine, as long as he gets the gig," she replies briskly.
To provoke a reaction, Cohen can be remarkably brave: when he goes out on the streets of Israel wearing a Hasidic hotpants outfit, he gets chased out of the Middle East. In another sequence he cheerleads an Arkansas redneck crowd into a homophobic frenzy then engages his male assistant (Gustaf Hammarsten) in a display of heavy petting that has the crowd throwing chairs and baying for his blood. And in the most masterfully sustained sequence he manages to bait and switch the entire audience of a Jerry Springer-style show when he comes on to discuss his single parent status. Initially they cluck sympathetically, until he mentions looking for "Mr Right" and later they turn downright hostile when he parades his "gayby", a newly adopted son from Africa, acquired in exchange for an iPod.
However, watching these vignettes is like watching someone hit a nest of African bees with a broom – the consequences might be spectacular, but they are hardly surprising.
Cohen relies heavily on eliciting confusion, disbelief or horror from his interviewees to generate laughs but his shtick is getting repetitive and Bruno is not as versatile a creation as Borat.
Even at 83 minutes, Bruno appears to runs out of ideas; an excursion to a swingers' party felt bogus and staged, and his closing pop video seemed like padding. It may have been almost four years in the making, but this movie is more Primark than Prada; a knockoff that might do the job for the summer season but is unlikely to stick around as a classic cut.
On release from Friday