As a comedy, “The Brothers Grimsby” is weak and scattershot, but it’s useful as an unintended self-indictment of the chattering classes’ disgust and disdain for white working folk. A movie that is half as unkind toward people of color as this one is to whites would be publicly burned and its makers called to account, but Sacha Baron Cohen, raised in the upper-middle class and a Cambridge graduate, relentlessly scorns his lower-middle-class character Nobby as stupid, drunk and patriotic. All of these characteristics are noxious to the swells these days, in Britain and elsewhere. Cohen’s movie is in large part an attack on England’s “oiks” or “yobs” — commonly supposed to live in dumpy public housing with too many children, doing uncouth things like putting English flags on their property and lining up for welfare checks (poverty: ha ha). The French call this sort of aristocratic sneering de haut en bas. I call it kicking a man when he’s down. A scene from “The Brothers Grimsby.”Po: Daniel SmithWorse, it’s pulling the rug out from under him, then laughing when he gets hurt. “Oikophobia” is a workable term for this distasteful tendency of elites to scorn the salt of the earth. Cohen’s climactic Donald Trump joke in the final moments of the movie tells more than he understands: Struggling whites on both sides of the Atlantic feel that the policies of Cohen’s smarty-pants guild of groovy globalists is responsible for their plight in the first place. Nobby, the kind of guy who likes to shove fireworks up his bum while getting drunk and watching soccer in the pub, blunders his way into a meeting with his long-lost brother, Sebastian (Mark Strong), now a secret agent. To follow the class japery, there is lots of porny humor in the middle of the movie: “Suck out the poison!” Sebastian commands his brother after being s with a dart in a sensitive place. OK, I laughed at the way that scene plays out, and there’s one hilarious episode in the middle of the movie when the boys discover the woe that can result when hiding from bad guys inside an elephant’s vagina. But the rest of the potty humor (including an endless discussion of a pesky chunk of human waste) is largely as tiresome as the regrettable dumb-guy gags, such as the numerical error on Nobby’s tattoo. Nor does the method Cohen devises for Harry Potter to get AIDS tickle the ribs. Later on, as Cohen (who co-wrote the script, which is directed by Louis Leterrier with many a clattering and random action scene) senses he’s in trouble with the people to whom he wants to sell tickets, the movie makes some sympathetic noises to the white working class. Cohen’s big speech is a (would-be) stirring defense of “the scum.” Nice try, but next time you’re trying to be nice to a group, maybe don’t call them “scum.” Cohen’s villain has devised a hate-fueled plot to attack the working class, but then again, so has . . . Cohen.
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