Brüno is an all-out assault on stupid straight people, so I’m guessing it won’t find the mega-audience that fell in love with the dumb foreigner Borat.

Which is too bad, because if you’re a paranoid heterosexual, you won’t appreciate the fact that Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest exercise in excess also ingeniously spoofs reality television, celebrities who snap up little babies in Africa (in exchange for an iPod, in Brüno’s case), closeted celebrities and celebrity obsession in general.

Sorry, all you gay watchdogs. The character Brüno is hardly a stand-in for all queer people. He’s a ludicrous loser from Austria, for god’s sake. Only one episode – a sex scene between Brüno and his little person boyfriend – is remotely homophobic, obsessing as it does on bodily fluids and fetishes.

The scene’s supposed to scoff at anti-gay assumptions about what queer guys do in bed, but it winds up making gay sex look totally terrifying and only reinforces the stereotypes it’s supposed to comment on. The sequence, coupled with Brüno’s many ass-in-our-faces moments, is so out there and comes so early on that it almost derails the entire movie. Focus too much on it and you lose sight of how sophisticated Baron Cohen’s humour actually is. 

If anything, Brüno is a queer variation on Eddie Murphy’s black family Norbit shtick, except that Baron Cohen isn’t gay, which is what makes his ability to comment on gay panic jokes from a queer perspective so impressive.

Think back a few weeks to the egregious My Life In Ruins, in which a straight guy is mistaken for queer and then gets revenge. Brüno subverts the convention by making you want the sissy to get the sex he’s trying to extract from his unsuspecting straight targets. 

The, er, butts of his jokes include swingers, a trio of redneck hunters, legions of passionate wrestling fans and a pair of Christians whose mission is to turn gay people straight. Give ’em hell, Brüno.

Personally, I don’t like movies that unfold as a series of sketches. I prefer that kind of comedy in smaller doses – occasional appearances by Brüno on Baron Cohen’s Ali G TV show would suit me fine. The film gets a little tedious by the two-thirds mark, when Brüno mimes fucking his favourite dead guy. 

But after watching the Michael Jackson memorial, which wound up with a hundred people onstage singing We Are The World, and then five hours later, witnessing the finale of Brüno, its own send-up of that kind of musical love-in, I can’t help but conclude that Sacha Baron Cohen is the English-speaking world’s savviest satirist.

Read the movie review.