THE BROTHERS GRIMSBY (Rated R)

No boundaries are apparently the operative words to describe the anarchic comedy of satirist Sacha Baron Cohen.

He’s jumped from faux-streetwise hip-hop personality-turned-talk show host Ali G to Kazakhstani journalist Borat on his first visit to America and to fame-seeking Austrian fashion icon Bruno.

Along the way, Baron Cohen has skewered a lot of targets, often to devastating effect. “The Brothers Grimsby” allows him to invent a wholly original creation, one that may have been inspired by spending too much time in a working class British pub during World Cup.

The Grimsby of the film’s title is a decaying seaport town that may have seen better days long ago. Now, it’s just a cesspool of rundown row houses and industrial rot, and fittingly, at least in the film, it is identified as the “Twin City of Chernobyl.”

Interesting to know (and you can Google this), the town of Grimsby has been frequently voted the worst city in which to live in Britain, according to some online websites and publications dedicated to revealing the underbelly of urban hellholes.

Baron Cohen’s Nobby Butcher, a lowlife subsisting on welfare, is a football hooligan fanatically devoted to the English national team.

He fits the stereotype of the booze-guzzling party animal when it comes to celebrating soccer matches with his pals at the local tavern.

Living with his plus-size girlfriend Dawn (Rebel Wilson), Nobby is a devoted family man given that he’s got nine (or maybe 11) kids, most of them looking like refugees from a punk rock band or candidates for reform school.

Nevertheless, the family is tight-knit, and Nobby has kept his long-missing younger brother’s childhood bedroom the way he left it 28 years ago when the brothers were separated after the death of their parents.

The more innocent humor comes from Nobby awkwardly carrying home a mattress on a city bus and from the names of his children, including Skeletor, Django Unchained, Tsunami and Gangnam Style. Luke gets his name from having a cancerous disease.

“The Brothers Grimsby” is a family reunion story, of sorts. Nobby stumbles upon the fact that his brother has returned to England and will be attending a special charity event to which he has somehow managed to get an invitation.

What Nobby does not realize is that his brother Sebastian (Mark Strong, playing the straight man) is a deep undercover MI6 agent on assignment to disrupt a terrorist plot.

Unfortunately, Nobby’s excitement at seeing his brother compromises the mission and results in tragedy.

Forced to go on the run, and being chased by deadly assassins, Nobby and Sebastian must use their wits to survive.

Of course, the problem is that Nobby is basically an idiot, so the challenge is for Sebastian to keep his older, clueless brother out of harm’s way.

The film’s plot, such as it is, puts the brothers in the crosshairs of the British government, which mistakenly believes that Sebastian is now a rogue agent, and at odds with a criminal cartel bent on a plot to release deadly toxins that are designed to reduce the world’s population to a more manageable and sustainable level.

Meanwhile, how does Penelope Cruz’s Rhonda George, the apparent target of an assassination attempt by shadowy forces, figure into overall plot given her leadership of World Cure, an international health organization that may or may not be the front for something sinister?

“The Brothers Grimsby” doesn’t much care about the details of coherent action, even though there are terrific sequences of the two brothers in shootouts and chase scenes that suddenly thrust Nobby into the realm of James Bond fantasyland heroics.

Mostly, the action, whether it involves the gritty streets and back alleys of England or the African plains, is just an excuse for Sacha Baron Cohen to dream up the most egregious scenarios for gross-out humor and bizarrely vulgar jokes.

There are things happening in this film that can’t be described or explained in proper company. Let’s just say there are some outlandish setups involving bodily fluids and body parts, both the humankind and those engaged by elephants during mating season.

The humor in “The Brothers Grimsby” is often mind-numbingly stupid and grotesque, but a lot of it very funny and you could find yourself feeling guilty or maybe even a bit ashamed for laughing.

As the brothers, Sacha Baron Cohen and Mark Strong have a great chemistry, with the latter, often irritably frustrated by his dimwitted sibling, nicely positioned as the comic foil. These brothers are indeed the yin and yang of comedy for “The Brothers Grimsby.”

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.