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Parents' Guide to

The Brothers Grimsby

By Sandie Angulo Chen, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 18+

Gross-out comedy is obsessed with bodily fluids, sex, guns.

Movie R 2016 83 minutes
The Brothers Grimsby Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Community Reviews

age 17+

Based on 4 parent reviews

age 18+

Couldn’t Finish It.

Other reviewers have described the attempts at comedy in this movie as “gross-out,” “raunchy,” or “slapstick.” We may need some context, here. “Gross-out” is the pie-eating contest scene from “Stand By Me.” “Raunchy” would best describe the Tom Hanks movie “Bachelor Party.” “Slapstick” makes me think of The Three Stooges, whose cartoon violence was so mild, I shrugged it off while I was in Kindergarten. We are borderline X-Rated by the time we get to the “suck out the poison” gag, and I don’t even want to get into the whole elephant scene, which is where I finally had to shut it off. It could have been a funny movie. It starts with a fun idea. It does seem to want to say something important about family. But you won’t hear that message over the noise of people accidentally being infected with AIDS (because Harry Potter getting AIDS is hilarious, right?) and you won’t see it, either, because it’s hidden behind male genitalia that are used as sight gags. I’m no Puritan, but this movie is rubbish, and I believe that if any laughter was derived from it, it was the writers laughing at how people like me would react to their movie and what sticks in the mud we are for being so bothered by elephant ejaculate. I didn’t finish this movie. You shouldn’t start it.

This title has:

Too much sex
Too much swearing
Too much drinking/drugs/smoking
age 17+

A very, very, VERY raunchy movie!

I'm still trying to process the elephant scene. Yup, there is literally a scene where the 2 main protagonists are inside a female elephant's vagina and become drenched in semen while the female elephant is repeatedly mounted by numerous males. Needless to say, this movie should not be watched by anyone younger than 17 years old.

This title has:

Too much sex
Too much swearing
Too much drinking/drugs/smoking

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say (4 ):
Kids say (13 ):

The occasionally funny (and always crass) gross-out humor of Baron Cohen's comedy pokes fun at the working classes and misses more than it hits with its puerile jokes. It wouldn't be a Baron Cohen movie if there weren't a few close-ups of male genitalia -- and in that regard, The Brothers Grimsby doesn't disappoint: You'll get plenty of junk shots, with Nobby forced to suck poison out of Sebastian's testicle, a cringe-inducing sequence taking place inside a female elephant's uterus while she's being mounted by male elephants with proportionately huge penises, and (of course) countless jokes about orifices, bodily fluids, and genital size. These jokes elicit nervous, awkward laughter at best because they last way too long ... and there's only so long you can laugh at men being sexually assaulted by elephants.

One of the comedy's more uncomfortable aspects is how often it makes fun of Nobby and his friends -- working-class Brits whose lives revolve around their local pub, their football team, and getting completely drunk. Rebel Wilson predictably co-stars as Nobby's girlfriend/the mother of his many children, while Isla Fisher (who's married to Baron Cohen) plays Sebastian's trusted, buttoned-up MI6 handler. Ultimately the comedy relies on the rapport between Baron Cohen and Strong, which has an admittedly odd-couple kind of charm, but there's just too much scatological stuff to sustain a film of even 83 minutes. Of course, audiences made up of predominantly young men will likely disagree.

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