‘The Brothers Grimsby’ review: Sacha Baron Cohen pushes boundaries

Be suspect of movies that are infamous before they even hit theaters.

The “they did WHAT?” anticipatory glee is bound to be a letdown — especially when the big joke is someone getting a disease. If you’ve managed to stay blissfully unaware of the gag, I won’t go into any more specifics. It is brazen, and will leave you dumbfounded.

Whether the joke will also elicit a laugh is the big question — one that applies to much of the movie’s humor, which starts with a Bill Cosby jab and steamrolls on from there.

The plot finds a sweet-hearted, dimwitted, working-class Northern Londoner (Sacha Baron Cohen’s Nobby) reunited with his younger brother, Sebastian (Mark Strong), after 28 years apart. Sebastian is now a top spy and assassin.

Nobby’s ill-timed reunion puts Sebastian’s job, and life, in jeopardy — tethering the two for the remainder of the movie as they try to clear Sebastian’s name and save the world.

The jester and the brain pairing is a time-tested formula that on paper seems pretty foolproof. But carried out here, however, it feels plucked from a 1990s movie that’s still experimenting with the novelty of gross-out humor, know-it-all storytelling and just how far you can coast on a star’s charisma.

Baron Cohen, who also cowrote the movie, is sort of lovable as Nobby. He’s such an earnest dolt that even the Cosby joke is almost OK. But then there’s a joke about pedophiles at Legoland, or an ancient “Saturday Night Live Celebrity Jeopardy” riff on the word “therapist,” and your jaw is again on the floor.

It’s almost impossible to tell whether you’re laughing at or with a particular party, if you’re even laughing at all. Ultimately, the jokes are more stupefying than funny.

It’s hard to give yourself over to a certain type of humor when you’re still recovering from the shock of what you just saw or heard. And boy, does “The Brothers Grimsby” push those boundaries, over and over again.

But in the spy spoof realm, I’d rather just re-watch last year’s almost equally raunchy but infinitely cleverer “Spy.”