The Brothers Grimsby

The Brothers Grimsby is a movie for those who thought Kingsman: The Secret Service didn't go far enough. If all the exploding heads and anal-sex jokes and creative impalements of Matthew Vaughn's tongue-in-cheek spy thriller didn't do it for you, rest assured: This time, we get to see British super-agent Mark Strong and his Midlands yob brother Sacha Baron Cohen evade the bad guys by hiding inside an elephant's vagina. Our heroes then find themselves trapped in that cavity as another elephant wanders up and engages in some hanky-panky. That, mind you, is the setup to the joke; the full gag is far more elaborate and gross.

Anyway, this is now a movie that exists, so...yay?

Baron Cohen made his fame toying with the boundaries of documentary and fiction. There's less performance art this time around: Grimsby doesn't have a nonfiction bone in its body. But it still pushes at boundaries, and the first one, as you might have noticed, is that of good taste. There's a subtler transgression here as well: Despite the baroque grotesquerie of the comedy, the film is also at times a reasonably committed action movie, like James Bond got hijacked by the world's most gutter-minded juvenile delinquent.

The director here is Louis Leterrier, best known for directing Edward Norton's The Incredible Hulk and the first two installments of the gonzo Jason Statham franchise The Transporter, and he understands the silly fun to be had from a fast, over-the-top, well-shot action scene. Most outright comedies nowadays aren't this well put-together.