With all this talent, how could Brothers (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) not be good? Josh Brolin and Peter Dinklage lead a cast that includes Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Brendan Fraser, and M. Emmet Walsh in supporting roles. Max Barbakow, director of the much-loved comedy Palm Springs, is behind the camera. Macon Blair, whose creative fingerprints are on Jeremy Saulnier films such as Blue Ruin, Green Room and Rebel Ridge, penned the screenplay. Etan Coen, whose writing credits include Idiocracy and Tropic Thunder, developed the story. With names like that, how can you lose? Well, as it turns out, just like this.
The Gist: They’ve always been petty. Even when fraternal twins Moke and Jady Munger were kids, they were blowing up the bake-sale cashbox for a fistful of singles. And they learned it by watching you, Moke and Jady’s mom, you, a career felon who ran off with a gutshot boyfriend and a fistful of stolen emeralds, trailing dust and screaming cop cars, and hasn’t been seen in 30 years. Now, as adults, Moke (Brolin) and Jady (Dinklage) are what you might call Coen Bros. Yokels, serial dipshits who make bad decisions and always find themselves outside the law. Five years ago, they were busted and Jady took the fall. But he’s getting out early thanks to a deal he made with a crooked cop, Farfel (Fraser). And now he’s about to disrupt Moke’s life, which is currently in turnaround: He has a job and a pregnant wife (Taylour Paige) and a house, and the in-laws are coming over for Thanksgiving. Livin’ the dream.
Well, Moke used to have a job. He shows up for his paper-hat gig at the fast-food fried chicken hut and gets canned for not disclosing his criminal record. And it only gets worse when Jady turns up on his doorstep with a one-last-heist scheme. It’s easy, Jady promises. It’s a “milk run,” Jady insists. It’s about getting their hands on their long-lost mother’s stolen emeralds, Jady purposefully neglects to tell him. And off they go, hittin’ the road, the reserved and mookish Moke not so sure about all of this, but compliant with his wily brother’s exigencies.
Episodes occur during the brothers’ stupid-ass quest: Tomei turns up as Jady’s dingbat potential love interest – and her CGI pet orangutan, who wants Moke to be his potential love interest. Farfel, who has some serious daddy issues with his corrupt-judge father (Walsh), wants those emeralds, so he keeps tabs on Jady. And sure enough, the twins’ mother Cath (Close) turns up, and nobody’s sure if she truly wants to mend fences and try to be the mother she never was, or if she just wants the booty. Either way, I’m scratching my head wondering how John Cena ended up not being cast in this movie. Seems like he’d’ve been a better Schwarzenegger to Dinklage’s DeVito. So it goes? So it goes.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Twins and Step Brothers seem like clear influences, as well as madcap Coen stuff a la Raising Arizona.
Performance Worth Watching: Fraser lets a bit of raging psycho slip through the cracks of his desperate oaf character, and winds up stealing a few scenes.
Memorable Dialogue: This is the type of movie where you want to hear Dinklage bellow wittier one-liners than “Fill your own hole!”, but here we are.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Brothers takes all that talent and somehow finds a way to make it less than the sum of its parts. Barbakow keeps the story moving, and brings us home in a concise 89 minutes (as it should be). But the writing is some watery soup, working with a tired premise and mostly failing to wring laughs out of it. It defies expectations by not exploiting the seemingly built-in comedy of two wildly different-sized twins, but in lieu of that it comes up with, well, not much; the subtext might reveal a study about how thin the line is between sibling rivalry and sibling devotion, but that’s an awfully generous reading that the movie frankly doesn’t deserve.
Dinklage is relatively spirited as a catalyst for trouble, and Brolin is mostly buttoned up as the less expressive of the twins, but beyond that, there’s not much to these characters. Tomei gooses the proceedings a bit with a wacky turn, and Fraser gooses it a little bit more, but there’s only so much they can do when the screenplay’s narrative foundation is bog-standard, like a cookie-cutter manufactured home in a subdivision full of the same rectangles covered with the same plastic siding. And Close – well, she’s in Full Flaming Maniac Mode at this stage of her career, OTT-mugging her way through this, The Deliverance and Hillbilly Elegy, and with three cartoonish performances in recent memory, that makes a bona-fide trend.
All these pieces could work together with the right direction, but Brothers is as blandly generic as its title. It’s middle-of-the-road timid, as if Barbakow tried to steer it away from being too crass or too wholesome and wound up in a toneless nowheresville. On paper, the premise and casting looks like a comedy slamdunk, but in execution, it’s an airball.
Our Call: Bottom line: Brothers is across-the-board disappointing. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.