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Brüno is a character designed to provoke a reaction and make other people feel uncomfortable via his sexuality. For example, how are you supposed to react if he opened your tent in the middle of the night, was completely naked, and asked to come in because he says a bear ate all his clothes, but left some condoms?

Some people clearly don’t want to have anything to do with homosexuals, let alone watch a film about one. There are few mainstream films where the main character is gay. There are fewer that obtain a wide release and become box office successes. Those that come to mind include Philadelphia and The Birdcage. The most recent is Brokeback Mountain, though it’s debateable whether the two lead characters are bisexual or homosexual. With the help of plenty of awards, it earned $83 million in the US and a total of $178 million worldwide.

Those against homosexuality were obviously going to avoid Brüno, but when you have gay rights groups upset and refusing to back with a film with a lead gay character, then something has definitely gone wrong. Believing that the film might do more harm than good, Jarrett Barrios, president of The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), saw an early screening and described how the film will, “hit the gay community pretty hard and reinforce some damaging, hurtful stereotypes.” He eventually released a statement on the Monday after Brüno’s opening weekend, which said how the film, “ultimately misses the mark,” and that he found it “frustrating and discouraging to be confronted with a movie that wants to increase America’s discomfort with homophobia, but which for much of America, seems likely to decrease its comfort with gay people.”

The film took $138.8 million over the world, with only $60 million coming from the US box office. It wasn’t exactly a flop, but it was far from the success that Borat was, which many were predicting. One could argue that having the film under perform at the box office might have unintentionally proved a point about homophobia in America.

Also, whereas Borat had stellar word-of-mouth working for it, Brüno didn’t. The film caused a number of walkouts, mainly upon two scenes. If they weren’t already offended by an early moment of gay sex, then it would have been a talking penis that got people to leave. One has to wonder what kind of film they thought they were going to see when paying for they tickets. Some articles even cropped up stating how Brüno suffered from "The Twitter Effect," given that there were a large number of negative posts about the film during its opening weekend, which likely led to its dramatic decline.

Upon first seeing the trailer, I was pretty much taken in. What stopped me from seeing it on the big screen was when the reviews came in. Although mostly positive, of those critics that did like it, many appeared to agree that even though it’s good, it’s no Borat. Basically, if there’s a film already out there that did this kind of shtick better, then I’d rather wait for the DVD.

The humor was more cringe-worthy rather than outright funny. I didn’t laugh so much when watching it, but oddly found myself laughing afterwards when thinking about it. It was also easier to see what exactly was set-up and what wasn’t. While Borat was fresh the first time around, those swayed by the curiosity of it back then weren’t coming back for seconds.

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