Brothers

4 outta 5

Brothers is an amusingly zany movie about low rent crooks that also doubles as a dysfunctional family reunion story. It is billed as an “action comedy” but there probably isn’t a lot of action, aside from one madcap chase on a golf course, and the finale features some big mishaps involving a large Christmas tree. What pops is the chemistry of the leads as two good actors make good quips and get a lot of comedy out of being annoyed at each other. Also, the mother who abandoned them turns out to be so incredibly amoral that it is kind of impressive! It is a movie where digging up a corpse counts as a family bonding, and there aren’t many other movies where that happens.

Moke (Josh Brolin) and Jady (Peter Dinklage) are brothers who grew up doing burglaries after their mother left them as teenagers. One heist ended up with Jady getting sent to prison for five years, until crooked police officer, Farful (Brendan Fraser), wants Jady to get some precious gems. Moke crashes back into his brother’s life, saying he needs Moke to break into a safe. But Moke is married to Abby (Taylour Paige) and has a baby on the way and wants to put his criminal life behind him, however he is unexpectedly fired from his service job when the employer finds out he is a convicted felon. So, he decides to go with Jady on this one last job, although it is difficult as Jady has Farful breathing down his neck, and things get even more complicated when Jady reveals that he is working with their long-lost mother, Cath (Glenn Close).

The movie has the feel of a modern-day noir film with the heroes getting beat down, but it is more madcap than it would seem. Even the beat downs that Jady gets by Farful are mandatory for the gritty noir hero getting beat up trope but still seem kind of funny as Fraser’s Farful hollers all this mean stuff at Jady. There is some strong Big Lebowski energy, the most blatant being Farful’s angry old coot of a father played by M. Emmet Walsh who seems to basically just be the mean old Lebowski from that film. Is this anywhere near as good as Big Lebowski? No way, but what is?

Dinklage opens the movie with a very awesome voiceover saying simply “Have you ever wanted to un$#$@ your life? Well, this is how I did just that.” which is a great way to grab the viewer’s attention. Dinklage always has a fantastic line delivery or reaction. Like when Jady meets up with a lady he was corresponding with in jail, played with some extremely funny quirkiness by Marissa Tomei, they end up listening to a heavy metal song and Dinklage’s thrashing is perfect. While the two are secluded together, Moke ends up in a room with an Orangutan (some impressive FX bring it to life like something out of Planet of the Apes) in a very bizarre bit. And the reaction when Tomei’s character thinks that they’re environmentalists out to steal back her ape is great.

It follows typical buddy movie logic, Brolin is the straight man to Dinklage’s off the wall crook. They have some great banter, like when they both do a variant of rock/paper/scissors involving Dracula and the Wolfman. Or just when Moke finds out that Jady has been communicating with their mother, he runs out and starts squealing like a kid, and the reveal that his mother is at the same motel literally sends him flying off a ledge. And there’s a few brawls between the brothers, one of which is broken up by the wife hosing them down which is a fairly easy gag but it works. Paige is in the standard concerned wife role, although she does get in a few good liners when she realizes that Moke has been lying about his history with Jady. There is also a subplot about Moke trying to impress her parents which feels like filler, which is saying something as the movie is under 90 minutes.

The opening scene has the boys as teenagers with their mother leaving them to go on the run which is funny for a scene that’s about a mother abandoning her kids, as her criminal boyfriend is amusingly nuts (so much that decades later, Jady still says he’s cool). Close as the older version is still a compulsive liar that Moke can see through even though Jady wants to believe her, and the ways she is still abandoning her adult children decades later is surprising. Fraser as the bad cop chasing down and frequently beating up on Jady is amusingly nasty as Fraser basically screams every one of his lines which remains funny. By the end he’s gone completely around the bend, waving around a shotgun, doing all of this to impress his uncaring father. For a movie that has a lot of family issues, it fits the bad guy’s motive.

While Brothers doesn’t add anything new to the format of the buddy comedy movie, it does have some interesting twists within the story, and the back and forth jabber between the two leads is solid. Also, there is a lot of screaming loudly which will get the viewer’s attention after the slower parts.