Bruno (R, 2009)

Austrian fashion correspondent Bruno (Sacha Baron Cohen), exiled form his job covering the world of fashion and design, heads to America to try to become a celebrity -- assisted by his associate producer Lutz (Gustav Hammerstein), who loves Bruno from afar. When Bruno tries to carry out attention-getting antics like adopting an African baby, creating a charity single, and fostering peace in the Middle East, his failure inspires him to look deep within his soul and question what really matters.

It's hard to have a bad time watching BRUNO -- the comedic daring that Cohen brings to the process is just too intense to ignore -- but, at the same time, it's also hard to not compare the film to Borat and find it wanting. What was once fresh now feels recycled, and Bruno has a much less coherent story than Borat's coast-to-coast journey.

Director Larry Charles still has a hand on how to craft this kind of material -- ambush interviews of unsuspecting people, moments where Bruno is pitted against the mob armed with nothing more than the misplaced courage of his idiotic convictions, and gags designed to shock -- but neither he nor Cohen nor their army of writers seem to have thought as much about the shape of the story as they did about individual bits. Episodic, scattershot, and a little unfocused, Bruno is sporadically funny, but it's hard to not think that the howls of controversy it generates will be louder than the audience's laughter.