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Updated Friday, August 7, 2009 9:36 am TWN, By Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post




	Bruno is taken from comic provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen's TV program "Da Ali G Show." He's a gay Austrian host of a fashion show who, as "Bruno" opens, falls on hard times. (Courtesy of Long Shong Entertainment) Enlarge Photo

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Bruno G型教主

The movie's finest moment is also its oddest: Bruno joins a group of hunters on a camping trip, and around the campfire speaks wistfully of "all the guys out there" while gazing at the night sky. The uneasy silence that ensues, with each man studiously avoiding the others' eyes, is an unblinking study in social awkwardness.

But then the viewer has to ask: What's Cohen's point? Even if they're uncomfortable, the men remain essentially tolerant until Bruno crosses boundaries that anyone, gay or straight, would surely object to. And let the viewer beware: If you thought the naked wrestling scene in "Borat" was over the top, get ready for lots of live sex acts, close-ups of men's nether regions (one of which actually talks at one point) and a graphically lascivious pantomime.

And so "Bruno" goes, taking all of its stunts to such unpalatable extremes that any larger philosophical point Cohen wants to make — about vapid celebrity culture or homophobia or Puritan sexual hypocrisy — is drowned out by Bruno's overweening unpleasantness.

In Borat, Cohen created a weird but mostly likable naif, whose bumbling travels revealed the roots of fear and ignorance that grow into larger and more dangerous hatreds. Bruno is no Borat. His narcissism, combined with the fact that the scenes in "Bruno" are far more obviously staged than in the previous movie, give the entire enterprise a nasty and, worse, irrelevant tone. Even an initially hilarious final flourish doesn't live up to its potential, and "Bruno" goes out with a shrug instead of a bang.

"Bruno" could have been a flawlessly timed satiric contribution to the conversation about gay civil rights. But by setting up facile and often clearly fictional targets, and taunting them with ever more raunchy and puerile stunts, "Bruno" settles for lazy laughs. With stakes this low, the question isn't what in the movie is real or fake. The question is: Who cares?

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