Review: Grimsby

In 1964 Raymond Durgnat wrote, “In 20 years’ time we will all be meeting at the NFT [as BFI Southbank was then called] to wax nostalgic over Carry On Nurse and saying, ‘Ah, the vitality of those old-time comedians – how well they reflected the sex-crazy 60s.’” And he was largely right. By the 1980s, as it turned out, there was cultural capital to be gained from talking up the lowbrow tradition in British comedy as subversive in its vulgarity, Bakhtinian, carnivalesque etc. On the occasion of a full NFT retrospective of Carry On comedies in 1999, around the time that Ali G made Sacha Baron Cohen’s name, Professor Colin MacCabe wrote in the Guardian that only “pompous idiots” could doubt the films’ merits, which included the operative assumption that “authority is little more than a ridiculous attempt to deny the reality and presence of the body”. So in decrying this witless rubbish one takes the risk that posterity will find something of value in it; indeed, as has happened in the past, the full weight of cultural authority may be thrown behind the purportedly anti-authoritarian.

But Grimsby really is witless rubbish. Baron Cohen plays Nobby, a fecund and feckless football fan from the titular Lincolnshire port; Mark Strong is his long-lost brother Sebastian, who, having being adopted by a well-off Home Counties family in childhood, has grown up to be an MI6 agent. Nobby interrupts him at a crucial moment during an operation in London, apparently causing the death of the head of the World Health Organization, and the pair then have to go on the run as a result, it being apparently impossible for Sebastian simply to explain what happened to his superiors.

After a brief time laying low in Grimsby, the two brothers go after the real villains, a terrorist group called the Maelstrom, first in South Africa, then at the World Cup final in Chile, where Maelstrom chief Rhonda George (Penélope Cruz) intends to spread a deadly, slow-acting virus among the crowd, causing a global pandemic. What promised to be, for better or worse, a domestic comedy about council-estate Britain is for the most part a globetrotting spy film with lots of jokes about anal violation.

Grimsby gets off fairly lightly, with a string of unfunny jokes reminiscent of Private Eye’s Yobs cartoon, but in truth the satirical aspect of Baron Cohen’s work has always been subordinated to the coarsely bodily. In one sequence Nobby and Sebastian crawl into an elephant’s vagina, only to have to deal with a whole queue of horny male elephants: both are covered in elephant semen and Nobby’s arse is left very much the worse for wear.

Later they have to stuff fireworks up their behinds and let them explode to stop the virus getting out: this time both of their arses are left very much the worse for wear. I’m not sure anyone’s authority is gravely endangered by all this, but perhaps critics 20 years hence will take another view.