Following the great success of his first feature film, "Borat," Sacha Baron Cohen explores further opportunities for comedy, social commentary, and sheer offensiveness in one of his other personae, the gay Austrian fashion journalist Brüno. The unnecessary umlaut epitomizes the movie's combination of sly understatement and wretched excess, a joke on the language and on the pretentiousness of the title character. Although it follows some of the same methods and addresses some of the same situations as its predecessor, and pushes the boundaries of the permissible even further, "Brüno" unfortunately fails to generate anything like the same effect as comedy, as satire, even as entertainment.

As in "Borat" the title character, also a television journalist, tells the story of a journey to America, in his case to achieve international celebrity. As he puts it, he wants to be the first flamboyantly gay Austrian since Arnold Schwarzenegger to become a movie star. His ambition leads him through some strange paths and into a succession of bizarre situations, most of them based on the single premise of the character and the picture, his flagrant display of his homosexuality.

As with Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen takes Brüno to some unusual places and puts him in some risky predicaments, some apparently real, some clearly staged. Dressed in a Velcro suit, he crashes a Milan fashion show, creating chaos when whole racks of clothing stick to him and he stumbles out on the runway like some bulky multicolored monster. Cohen shows his courage when he attempts to return to the show, still in character though sans suit, and suffers some manhandling from the police.

That pattern of completely offensive conduct in a sort of ambush of unsuspecting targets, perfected in Cohen's "Da Ali G Show" and in "Borat," continues throughout "Brüno." He invites Paula Abdul to an interview, substituting "Mexican chair people" for furniture and wheeling in a naked man strategically covered in canapés as a table (she exits in haste); under the pretext of another interview and the further pretext of a seduction, he strips off his clothes in front of Congressman Ron Paul (another hasty retreat). Worst of all, he shows a pilot for a fictitious television show that features the grossest sort of nudity, including penile gymnastics, to a focus group, shocking and angering everyone.

Cohen's overdone and bizarre sex scenes in "Brüno" creak with elaborate and laborious attempts at humor; a couple feature a special dildo powered by an exercise machine and some intricate arrangements of chains, handcuffs, masks, and gags. In a visit to a swingers' club meeting, he shows some apparently real conversations and interactions, then in an obviously staged sequence, a dominatrix with breasts like basketballs whips him enthusiastically until he explodes out a window like a movie cowboy in a saloon fight.

Frequently the put-ons and pranks, even when funny, seem gratuitously cruel, a series of cheap shots at victims who hardly deserve a level of satire that should be directed against rich, powerful, and important people. His campy responses to a couple of counselors who think they can transform him into a heterosexual seem too obvious and too easy, generating a certain embarrassed sympathy - the poor, earnest, unsuspecting dupes don't really deserve his patented treatment.

Perhaps the best moment in the film echoes Borat's appearance at the Southern rodeo in the earlier movie. Disguised as a sort of professional macho heterosexual at a mixed martial arts contest, Brüno orchestrates a series of chants about being straight from a crowd of really quite disturbing people, then passionately kisses his adoring sycophant Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten), which sends the mob into a frenzy of hatred and violence, underlining the scariness of the homophobia that should provide the legitimate subject of Cohen's satire.

"Brüno" displays the originality, courage, and even the occasional brilliance of Sasha Baron Cohen's approach to comedy, but it also suggests that it contains within it the seeds of its own decadence and demise. Depending on the need to shock, his outrageousness devolves into excess; the satire turns cruel and obvious; the allegedly impromptu and spontaneous surface frays to show the fakery underneath. Worst of all, the one joke of the move grows increasingly tiresome and depressingly unfunny.