Parents' Guide to The Brothers Grimsby

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.