I know guys who still quote Borat all the time - like, a lot. The same snippets of dialogue from that unbelievably popular docu-comedy pop up in conversation all the time with a couple people I know - they love it, they live it, they relive it: It's more than a classic to them, it's an institution.

None of those guys paid to see Bruno in theatres - the unabashed gay content probably made them uncomfortable to see it in public with either their buddies or their wives - but your pal Mike did, and boy was it a let-down. Sacha Baron Cohen is an astounding comedian, and a performer who is crazily unafraid to push people's buttons (to often hilarious extents), but something about Bruno seems forced and uninspired, like Cohen and co. aren't firing on all cylinders narratively.

There are moments of outright hilarity here, though - as Cohen's gay fashionista Bruno saunters his way though this film, we see our eponymous hero crash fashion shows, pop up naked in a southern hunter's tent on a camping trip, and simulate fellatio on the world's favorite deceased lipsyncher, and sometimes the results are cringe-stunning (the camping trip with a group of reticent hunters is especially uncomfortable and funny, especially when Bruno starts talking Sex and the City). Yet there are overdone sequences, as well. I feel like the early segments with Bruno's pygmy lover are designed to be over-the-top and shocking, but the acrobatic dildo gymnastics the two perform with each other is relatively incomprehensible, though it proves how odd of a world we live in that a scene showing Cohen and his male lover simply having intercourse would probably prove to be more shocking than these scenes with catapult strap-ons and such.

The long and the short of it is that compared to Borat, Bruno ain't even a hill of beans. I don't know that I'd personally call that film a comedy classic, but I nevertheless laughed my tail off watching it the first time (if just for the nude wrestling scene at film's center), but there was a believable, almost endearing arc to Borat, which is something that Bruno lacks. The emotional love between Bruno and his assistant - the relationship that is placed in the film to have the biggest payoff - lacks any even pseudo-romantic ties at all: In Bruno, it's not a full movie, it's just a collection of sequences.

I'm curious to hear what my Borat-quoting buddies will have to say about it.