Has Sasha Baron Cohen's Brüno burned out before even arriving on screen?  I don't know that I'd go quite that far, but I do know that I'm feeling a whole lot less enthusiastic about it now then I was when the red-band trailer arrived a good while back. And I also know that - unlike when Borat came down the line - I'm not hearing much of anyone talk about being excited to go see it on Friday, a situation that comes rather as a surprise. Will it flop? Again, I wouldn't go that far  -- other than Cohen's enormous salary it was dirt cheap to make and they've invested so much into the marketing that it pretty much can't help but dominate the box office this weekend. But I'd be willing to bet that the take will drop sharply from week one to week two. The question is why.

It'd be kind of nice to think that the gay angle will limit Brüno's appeal -- not in the 'we don't want to see a movie about a gay man' sort of way, but in a 'we don't want to see a movie that mocks gay men' sort of way. You know, because it's easy to get away with spoofing on Kazakhstan -- a place virtually nobody knows anyone from -- but harder to get away with playing into gay stereotyping with all of the progress that's been made on the gay rights front. And I think that may have an impact on the box office -- it's hard to picture the thousands that turned out for the Pride parade turning out for this. But I don't think that's the main reason.

Really, I think it's more that Cohen's act has simply worn thin.  Brüno is essentially the exact same movie as Borat in the way its conceived and shot, and the setup for all of the jokes exactly the same: take an extreme stereotype and drop it into middle America and see what happens. That Cohen couldn't change things up a bit given how long he had between the two films is... well, it comes across as pretty shockingly lazy and creatively bankrupt, particularly coming from a guy so praised for his creative energy. The repetition of format hurts but I think what hurts even more is that unlike Borat -- a totally unique character who could have come only from Cohen -- Bruno is nothing more than a collection of gay stereotypes that we've seen low rent comedians riff on for decades now. I have no doubt that Cohen will push things out to farther extremes than we've seen before but still there's nothing here that couldn't have been done by any number of other comics. Hell, even the funniest bit in the red-band trailer -- "How do you defend yourself from a man attacking you with a dildo?" -- is nothing but a gayed up riff on the old Monty Python routine on how to defend yourself from a man attacking you with a piece of fruit. And I just can't get excited about paying theater prices to see a guy retelling jokes I've heard before.

The really sad thing here, of course, isn't that Brüno may well underperform at the box office. No, the sad thing is that the marketing machine has been so overwhelming and its domination of screen space so complete that Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker -- a truly stellar movie with the misfortune of being set in the Iraq War, a move guaranteed to bring on commercial failure -- will come and go in its limited release without anyone ever really noticing it was there at all. I reviewed this one here when it screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and I recommend it very highly. Catch it while you can.