Rating:

Following the success three years ago of his raunchfest/performing arts exercise, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit of Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” British satirist Sacha Baron Cohen has mined another of his old “Da Ali G Show” characters for a full-length movie, “Bruno.” The new film, though, is much less successful than its predecessor, mostly due to its repetitive nature, as well as the simple fact that it’s built around a much less funny character.

The movie follows the same general outline as “Borat” — the plot is but a clothesline for a series of gags in which incredulous passersby react with shock at the antics of Cohen’s character. This time, it’s Cohen’s Bruno character, a gay, Austrian fashion reporter, following in Borat’s footsteps in traveling across America, mocking all the way.

The film’s weakness is obvious: it has exactly one trick up its sleeve, and merely repeats that trick over and over for its entire 87-minute running time: Bruno acts outrageously, stereotypically and aggressively gay — complete with copious amounts of male nudity — in front of the sort of people you’d expect to be shocked by that sort of thing. All sorts of marks get the Bruno treatment, from a military drill sergeant to the audience at a Springer-like talk show, to both Orthodox Jews and Muslims in the Middle East, to various folks in parts of red state America.

The premise is very funny at the beginning, especially in a couple of truly brilliant moments, most notably a focus group in which Bruno’s “TV pilot” rapidly devolves into gay dance erotica, and a scene in which Cohen interviews a woman who wants to put her child in a TV show that’s as chilling as it is hilarious.

But the longer the movie goes, the more hit-or-miss the gags get. The first Hitler joke is worth a chuckle; the next five, not at all. And a sequence in which Bruno makes a pass at former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is a lot funnier in theory than in practice. The film ends with a totally witless “We Are the World” parody that’s supposed to shock us just by the star power involved; I don’t remember the last big comedy that ended this flatly.

In fact, the movie’s whole second half is almost entirely laugh-free. Sequences set at a swingers party and a hunting trip go nowhere, while a scene at a mixed martial art (MMA) fight fails because it has about 10 minutes of setup, leading up to a punchline that we can see coming from the beginning — because it’s the same one as every other sequence in the film.

We also get the sense, as with Borat, that the movie isn’t entirely on the level and at least some of the marks know what’s going on. For instance, in a long sequence set in Hollywood, we’re supposed to think no one recognizes Cohen from “Ali G” or “Borat”? And I’m still wondering how Cohen escaped the MMA sequence alive.

Sacha Baron Cohen is unquestionably a supremely talented man, and he deserves credit for his utter commitment to the bit, even when it fails. But with “Bruno,” we get the sense that it was only made because “Borat” was a hit and it was the only one of his characters that hadn’t had a movie yet. Bruno the character was never as multifaceted, or nearly as funny, as Borat; the same goes for their respective movies.