Mine’s a lager, shaken not stirred
Grimsby 15 cert, 83 min ★★★★ Dir Louis Leterrier Starring Sacha Baron Cohen, Mark Strong, Isla Fisher, Rebel Wilson, Penélope Cruz, Johnny Vegas
Nobby Butcher might be your worst nightmare. Proudly feckless, spectacularly fertile, football-obsessed, and with a weekly calorie intake that runs into the low millions, he’s a fairground-mirror reflection of England at its worst.
He’s also the new character from Sacha Baron Cohen, the man behind Ali G, Borat and Brüno: that unholy trinity of comic grotesques that told us a lot more about ourselves than we’d like to admit. In Grimsby, Baron Cohen turns his attentions back towards England, satirising the Establishment’s contempt for what Nobby himself proudly calls “scum” with ribald and corrosive glee.
On the surface, the film is a globetrotting gross-out caper in which Nobby, who’s from a hellish version of the titular Lincolnshire town (“twinned with Chernobyl”), is reunited with his long-lost brother Sebastian (Mark Strong), who has become a spy for the British secret services – and part of the powers-thatbe that have no time for Nobby and his scrounging ilk. The two are caught up in a terrorist plot to rid the earth of its underclass, and this gives Nobby the chance to live out a James Bond fantasy of Englishness, with his own lager-swilling twist.
It’s the kind of scenario Peter Sellers might have dreamt up while brushing his teeth, and some of the comic set-pieces – including Nobby’s seduction of a fabulously overweight maid (Gabourey Sidibe) at a South African hotel – allow Baron Cohen to indulge his Sellersian fantasies to an unprecedented degree. But the script, by Baron Cohen, Phil Johnston and Peter Baynham, keeps punching in the right direction – that’s upwards – with a violence and determination that would make Tyson Fury flinch.
Grimsby’s jokes aren’t at the expense of Nobby, but the people who imagine he really exists: i.e., us. The punchline is that he’s 100 per cent monster, but also 100 per cent human. All right, not all the jokes. Some of
Grimsby’s other targets include Donald Trump and Daniel Radcliffe, whose fates here are too breath-catchingly cruel to spoil, and also the admirably game Strong, whose character is beset by a constant stream of humiliations that hit with the force of a jet of… well, you’ll see.
The action scenes are well staged, though I wish more time was spent with Nobby, his paramour Dawn (Rebel Wilson), their shaven-headed brood, and friends (Oh for more of Johnny Vegas and Ricky Tomlinson).
Grimsby doesn’t wound quite as devastatingly as Borat or Brüno, but it’s a vital, lavish, venomously profane two fingers up at Benefits Street pity porn and the social division it fosters. I laughed, winced, gagged, then laughed even more.
Grimsby is released in the UK tomorrow