Apparently the joke is on me...

I pride myself on never having walked out of a movie. It's been a close call a couple of times;
Million Dollar Baby pushed me to the limits of my endurance. It started out well enough, lulling us into a false sense of security that it might be a sort of female Rocky vibe before turning into a drudgerous euthanasia drama and sucking the will to live directly out of my body. The cinematic equivalent of a Dementor, if you will. Michael Bay provided two of the others: Pearl Harbor which was 20 minutes of excitement crowbarred into two hours of bullshit romantic... whatever that was, and Armageddon where I didn’t get a chance to walk out because my biological defense mechanisms kicked in and I fell asleep for a good chunk of it.

I guess it's a combination of being too stubborn to let a film defeat me and the fact that if I paid that much money I'm going to see it all the way through to the end, no matter how mind numbing it is. I have never felt the urge more strongly than a recent chance viewing on a TV that as a guest,  I had no executive control over. The only saving grace was that I hadn't paid any money to see it and I had fortuitously neither brought anything combustible with me nor did I have a decent length of rope about my person. I will rue my lack of preparedness until the day I die.

One word: Grimsby.

I didn't choose to watch this atrocity, but watch it I did. If I'm honest, I've never watched any of Sacha Baron Cohen's films because deep down I knew the kind of apoplectic rage they would evoke and being a magnanimous type of fellow I thought it best to spare everyone. Yet here we are. Buckle up.

It's difficult to be eloquent when confronted with the sheer levels of stupidity at work here. I mean, I wasn't really expecting a lot out of the man who brought us Ali G, Börat and Bruno and we can skip over the plot such as it is without bothering the word count too much. Separated brothers end up leading polar opposite lives; one ends up as a Liam Gallagher look-alike scrounging off the state in a crack den in the eponymous Northern town, the other is basically James Bond. I'm sure at this point hilarity was supposed to ensue but somewhere along the line that got conveniently bypassed. Well, not entirely convenient for me but you get my point.

What this movie consists of is the type of humour most 12 year old boys have stopped laughing at. Yes, yes we all enjoy the odd cock joke, we are but human after all. What passes for humour here involves our mismatched siblings escaping detection inside the vulva of an elephant, only for the local bull male to engage in intercourse with said hiding place. At one point the spy gets shot in the dick with a poison dart and obviously the only way to sort that out is a spot of incestuous fellatio (now with added teabagging). There's at least one casual pedophile joke just chucked out there nonchalantly. We are also treated, if that is indeed the word, to the enduring image of two grown men impaling themselves ass-first on rockets in order to contain the explosive release of a deadly toxin... I'm sorry, I just can't. Enough.

I can't even adequately put into words how God-awful it is. It is in fact, a comedy devoid of any actual humour. That in itself is bad enough. What really stuns me is that anyone other than Cohen thought it was worth putting into production. I can only imagine the pitch meeting must have involved a human sacrifice, the exchange of a sinister briefcase and a celebratory circle jerk. Quite aside from that, actual, real life actors read this script and decided their mortgage repayments outweighed the need to maintain any sort of self esteem or dignity. Mark Strong's agent must have either been a hostage negotiator in a past life or is in possession of some particularly compromising photographs. The idea that those photos are worse than the enduring digital video of taking a facial from an elephant is unsettling at best.

It's hard to even maintain a sense of humour about having watched it. I had to hold my tongue at the time, being in polite company and all, but it was painful. Physically painful. Almost like my internal organs were so bemused by what I had subjected them too that they were shutting down one by one in protest. OK, that's hyperbole, but it was so bad.

Unless you're The Independent newspaper.

They gave it a pretty astonishing 4 stars out of 5. One star off the highest possible and rated the same as Moana (pretty good except for the unceasing singing) Sully (where they give Tom Hanks an Oscar nod) and Fantastic Beasts (roundly enjoyed by critics and audiences alike) They even used words "joyous" and "feel good" and unfathomably referred to it as a family film, which just makes me terrified for the reviewer's family of I'm honest. I can picture them locked into a viewing room, being forced to watch this kind of shite and maintain their rictus grins for fear of a fortnight in The Cupboard again. Sorry, I digress.

All this for a movie that had to put disclaimers in the credits so that Daniel Radcliffe and Donald Trump didn't sue them for saying they have AIDS. It genuinely makes me wonder: what do you have to do to get 1 star?