Grimsby (2016)

There is a moment in Grimsby, and I use the word moment generously, in which two grown men take refuge inside the reproductive tract of an elephant and emerge glazed in the consequences. This is presented not as a low point but as a set piece, and the film regards it with the pride of a craftsman unveiling a cabinet. Louis Leterrier, a director of considerable technical competence, has applied that competence to a script by Sacha Baron Cohen and two collaborators, and the result is a spy farce that mistakes volume for wit and bodily fluid for punchline. The plot concerns a football hooligan reuniting with his long-lost MI6 brother to foil a philanthropist's bioweapon scheme, which is a serviceable enough skeleton for a comedy that has no interest in skeletons or, indeed, anything else.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a wasteland, and it seems content to be one. The cast includes Penelope Cruz, Gabourey Sidibe, David Harewood, and Rebel Wilson, hires that reflect the ordinary arithmetic of a studio comedy rather than any curatorial intent. The lone gesture toward topicality is a villain whose charity gala conceals a virus, a faint suspicion of the wealthy that carries no economic argument whatsoever. A Jewish-Palestinian boy named Schlomo is deployed as a shock gag, drained of any meaning beyond the gag itself. The humor is laddish, crude, and proudly regressive, which is a posture, not a politics. A feminist reading would require material to read.

The film offers no sermon, no lesson, no environmental lament, and no affirming politics of the body, though it does exhibit a sustained and unwholesome interest in the body's various failures. It simply wants to offend and occasionally succeeds. It grossed twenty-eight million against a thirty-five million budget and finished eighth on its opening weekend, which spares us the burden of treating it as a cultural event. We are left with a footnote, a curiosity, and a great deal of elephant semen.