Earlier this year, I saw Grimsby, the new film by Sacha Baron Cohen, at the Cineworld above my local shopping centre. It had only come out that day, so the audience was big for a weekday afternoon. Not that big, though: I counted seven of us. There were a few scattered laughs, and the comic centrepiece – a scene best described as elephant bukkake – brought yelps of hysteria. Mostly, however, there was silence. Some time before the end, a phone went off. Its owner left to answer it. I heard him at the door as the film played on. “Don’t worry – it’s shit,” he said. “See you in Foot Locker.”
This was Britain. A fortnight later, Grimsby opened in the US, now retitled The Brothers Grimsby. It didn’t help. In both countries, the film – the story of lumpen hooligan Nobby Butcher, played by Baron Cohen, and his secret agent brother – proved wildly unpopular. The budget was never officially released, but initial reports put it at $60m (£32.2m). Box office returns were clearer. To date the film has made £5m in Britain and $6.7m in the US, the kind of numbers at which heads voluntarily detach and present themselves for rolling. In risk-averse modern cinema, for a studio movie to bomb like this is quite an event. For Baron Cohen, the low may have come when industry analyst Jeff Bock told the Hollywood Reporter: “I’m not saying he needs to join Adam Sandler’s posse at Netflix, but …”
Bock was not alone. Pundits gathered to prod the body. Frequently mentioned was the Sony Pictures hack, when a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace leaked a huge amount of confidential information from the studio. Backed by Sony, Grimsby was shot in the summer of 2014, wrapping just in time to plough into the crisis that engulfed the studio that November. With the calamity apparently caused by North Korea taking umbrage at Seth Rogen’s The Interview, the mood around the corporation towards another shock-tactic comedy may not have been one of giddy excitement. (An early version of Grimsby involved the Queen giving HIV to the pope.)
The inquest went on. The whole premise of a spoof spy movie, it was said, was old hat. The target audience had already been hoovered up by the sardonic blockbuster Deadpool. In the US, clearly, no one would want to see a film involving occasional references to soccer.
So how does this happen? How does Baron Cohen, a smart and gifted man, end up in such a doomy pickle? Promoting the film, he talked about his love of risk, but this was probably not what he meant. Then again, the same interviews mentioned his attention to detail, whereas to many observers the shocking thing about Grimsby was not the elephants but the sloppiness. Playing a character from Humberside, Baron Cohen’s accent didn’t survive his opening line, tumbling back into the Hampstead Garden Suburb of his youth. It was a small moment, but one that said it all about a movie whose wobbly specifics (one shot featured roadsigns for Tilbury, Essex, where filming took place) suggested a corrosive attitude of Will This Do?
Way back when, the geography had been sharper. Ali G, the Surrey B-boy who gave Baron Cohen his breakthrough, came from Staines, and while the commuter belt outpost had presumably been chosen for the giggly connotations of its name, it was also exactly the kind of place where suburban herberts might fixate on Wu-Tang Clan. Plenty about Ali G felt plausible. Baron Cohen admitted that, growing up in 80s London, he had been fond of the “graffiti and language” of early hip-hop, so the joke was on him, too.
But that was only half the story. In 1998, you watched Channel 4’s otherwise lifeless 11 O’Clock Show for Baron Cohen’s ambush interviews of public figures. The gag wasn’t just Ali G throwing gang signs: it was him coaxing the Tory grandee Rhodes Boyson into agreeing that kids should get “caned” in school, or hearing the Unionist politician Sammy Wilson call himself British in his Belfast office and be asked: “Is you here on holiday, then?”
The comedy, however, contained the seeds of its own destruction. The more recognisable Ali G got, the smaller the pool of the clueless to interview. As early as 2000, the guests on his solo vehicle Da Ali G Show already felt fractionally too aware of how this worked. So he seized the chance to find new victims in the US, before retiring the character. Then came Borat: the Kazakh naif touring backwoods America in his creator’s career-making film.
Geography was in play again, although now considerably more loaded. As outlined in slightly defensive interviews, Baron Cohen’s thinking was almost legalistic: the Kazakhstan of Borat, with its fermented horse urine and omnipresent prostitution, was a fiction, but it had to be named after the real Kazakhstan because the real joke was on people who would believe Kazakhstan was really like that. This didn’t soothe the Kazakhs, whose authorities issued a wounded denunciation.
But Hollywood loved it. With an unlikely Oscar nomination, Borat cemented Baron Cohen’s status as a film star. Clearly, this was very much what he wanted: not the paddling pool of Britain, but LA, movies, the big league. And Grimsby is just what happens when the big league goes wrong.
One problem is that since the start, he’s been trying to outrun nature. Like Ali G, Borat’s success left the character used up, and the same thing happened to Brüno Gehard, his gay Austrian fashion journalist. So finally, in an attempt at sustainability, Baron Cohen quit the prank interviews altogether, first with The Dictator, a half-funny scripted comedy about the petulant tyrant of a fictional African state, then with Grimsby. Hollywood careers are hard enough to manage without having to change your basic act: it’s a tribute to Baron Cohen’s self-belief that not only did he persuade executives to stay on board, he got bigger budgets out of them.
In the early 2000s, he moved to the Hollywood Hills. In truth, the idea of him as an outsider had always been fanciful. Even in the days of the Da Ali G Show, he was starring in the video for Madonna’s single Music. By the time of Grimsby, you could find him in the tabloids on a Saint-Tropez holiday with Bono and Noel Gallagher. At such a highwire junction of his career, one worthwhile risk could have been to make his new character an exiled British super-comedian in LA, juggling overheads and trying to appear edgy while hanging with U2. Instead, he came up with Nobby Butcher. Grimsby was a parade of Jeremy Kyle grotesques, created by a former pupil of Haberdashers’ Aske’s – one of the country’s leading private schools.
And gross-out is a strange fit for the middle-aged: the comedy of elephant cum is surely the province of the young. But kids today have their own guerilla comics, racking up views on YouTube with the likes of Baiting Out Skets (and Baiting Out Fuckboys), DIY vox pops of questionable ethics concerning the sex lives of young Londoners. Where does a 44-year-old movie star stand in relation to that, other than creepily on the margins?
Anyway, it’s still the pranks that Baron Cohen loves. Even if he hadn’t admitted it in interviews, you could see it in the promotional stunts he carried out for Grimsby, which he seemed to enjoy more than being in the film. Then there was the glee with which he relaunched Ali G at this year’s Oscars. Much to his delight, that involved sneaking into costume in the toilets against specific orders, enraging the olds at the Academy. But watch the clip now and rather than gasping at the audacity, you end up focused on his co-presenter, actor Olivia Wilde, obliged to stand by silently while he booms through the material about “Idris Elbow”.
The shame is this could all be different. Had fate unfolded in another direction, Baron Cohen would now be starring in the endlessly delayed Freddie Mercury biopic, a story of debauchery and excess he was signed up for and born to play. Recently, while plugging Grimsby, he recalled the moment he realised he had to drop out: when an unnamed member of Queen, also a producer, explained how the best part of the story would be the sudden twist halfway, after which the film would find the band going “from strength to strength” without their dead lead singer.
Sacha Baron Cohen has not lost his ear for a funny story. It will come in useful for the comeback.
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