One can’t help but admire the utter fearlessness of Sacha Baron Cohen’s brand of character-based humour. Cohen pushes the limits of tolerance and bad taste again with Brüno, the third of three characters that were a part of Cohen’s Da Ali G Show. In 2006, Cohen rocked insecure Americans and threw a terribly bright light on their prejudices with the help of Kazakhstai TV journalist Borat. Brüno is by no means tamer than its predecessor, but American homophobia is less taboo than the racist, anti-Semitic and misogynistic tendencies highlighted by Borat. And while Borat the film had this raw, untamed quality to it, Brüno, by comparison, is a much more polished affair, and somehow not as naturalistic.

Still, there’s a lot here to get offended about, and Cohen spares no expense to either get you laughing or revolting you to the point of riot. It starts with Brüno hosting his show, Funkyzeit mit Brüno, from the hallowed halls of Milan Fashion Week. After an unfortunate incident with an all Velcro suit, Brüno is banned from the fashion world and sees his show cancelled. Moving to America, he tries to become a worldwide celebrity, securing himself an agent and starting an infotainment show called “A-List Celebrity Max-Out mit Brüno,” which is, of course, an unmitigated disaster. Even by Hollywood standards, there’s never been a focus group that’s gone this badly.

From there Brüno tries his hand at solving Mid-East peace, adopting an African baby and eventually going straight. There’s a lot of build up to that last one, which features Brüno looking for the key to becoming heterosexual in the American Bible belt. Unfortunately for Cohen the prejudices of the moral majority in the Southern US just aren’t as funny as they used to be, if they ever were. So-called gay converters, red neck hunters and army drill sergeants remain persistent and over the top stereotypes without Cohen’s help casting them that way. If anything’s stifling a laugh in these scenes it’s because you know that even Ted Haggard can refuse his own homosexuality with a straight-face.

The last third of the film is the weakest, probably in part because the first two thirds are solid situation-based comedy that only rarely bears the dependency of the punchline on Brüno being gay. “A-List Celebrity Max-Out” would still be off the charts nuts regardless with having Paula Abdul sitting on “Mexican Chair People” while talking about human rights, and then featuring an “exclusive interview” with Harrison Ford that consist of an ambush and a two work interview. Guess which two words; one of them is naughty.

Then he goes to a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon in an attempt to find fame through kidnapping and calls Osama bin Laden a “a dirty wizard or a homeless version of Santa Claus” to the face of the leader of a known terrorist group. In these situations you can’t help but laugh because the very real possibility was that Cohen could have been killed. What kind of mind takes his life into his own hands just to make comedy? I mean, Bob Hope entertained soldiers in war zones, but this is ridiculous. Even stateside, Cohen shows no sense (or perhaps that’s no fear) to do anything for a laugh to his audience no matter how unfunny, or even hate-inducing, his unwitting co-stars find the gag.

The trick is with Brüno that you kind of can figure out what’s staged and what’s genuinely set-up without the knowledge of the people surrounding Cohen and cohorts. A sketch involving parents auditioning their babies to pose for some scandalous, possibly blasphemous pictures, with Brüno’s adopted son is obviously staged; the aforementioned focus group though, was not. Any gags that combine the two work until they don’t. The reactions of a Texas talk show audience to Brüno’s and his African-named son O.J. are unscripted, the part where Child Services apparently takes the child away is not, and we know it.

Clearly, Cohen’s ambitions were greatly expanded in wake of his Borat success, but the balance felt out of whack in Brüno. It just couldn’t sustain the high-level of laughs all throughout, and depending on how easily you’re tickled, there may even be minutes when you’re bored waiting for the next gag to happen. Plus there’s no centrepiece sequence, a scene that everybody will be talking about because of its audaciousness, and inability to be replicated, like the naked fight from Borat. Still, Cohen shows that he can summon discomfort like nobody else and no matter how ludicrous he might act, he’s always able to bring people out of their PC bubble. One wonders though, how long can he sustain these films? Because no matter how dim the general public may be, eventually they catch on.