Reviews Film / Grimsby

Escape from Grimsby

It has been a while since I've watched a gross-out comedy, or in fact a Sacha Baron Cohen movie. Since Borat, Baron Cohen seems to have followed the exact same career trajectory as Mike Myers, having a sudden surge of early 2000s popularity, followed by voice acting gigs in kids movies, which rapidly tapers off into lazy sequel movies and derivative comedy vehicles. Grimsby, or Brother's Grimbsy as it's called in some parts, is perhaps the laziest and most derivative comedy I have ever seen.

In my opinion, good gross out comedies have very strict limits. You get to have one big protracted gross out scene, a few shorter gross out moments, and the rest of the movie has to get by on normal jokes. If you have to keep resorting to shit and knob gags, you are telegraphing that you've already ran out of anything witty to say. Grimsby had about four protracted gross out scenes before I gave up and switched it off. It had a balls sucking scene, an "oh gross, a fat woman having sex!" scene, that is then immediately followed by a long conversation about a big shit. I turned it off when we got to the climb inside the elephant's vagina scene, at which point I saw there was still 40 minutes of movie to go.

So how did I get into this? Well, I grew up near Hull, the next town over from Grimsby, so I know all about it. Grimsby never recovered from the discovery of stone tools. It's a place where people still point at aeroplanes, and where people lick the pollution out of the air for sustenance. The wisest thing anyone ever did there was put "grim" into the actual name of the town as a warning to others. I automatically have to watch any movie that features the town, especially if it promises to take the piss out of the place. Grimsby the movie manages a bit of that early on. It's also the only bit that manages to include the barest amount of social commentary; the sort of stuff that old Baron Cohen once cut his teeth on. It feels like a sorely missed opportunity that instead of sticking to the location, the movie quickly switches over to a generic world-trotting spy action romp; the exact same one I saw only the other month in Charlies Angels. The only difference is that Angels lacked obnoxious toilet humour (in this case involving literal toilets).

I'm no connoisseur of the genre, but this movie managed to have me longing for the hay days of Tom Green. The only ones who could find this travesty of a movie funny are people actually from Grimsby.