Crime comedy Brothers strains for wacky, achieves hacky

With its bland title, generic logline, and overqualified cast, the crime comedy Brothers seems made for the streaming-content junkyard—the eternal limbo of the if-you-liked recommendation queue. For director Max Barbakow, who made a promising debut with the fantasy rom-com Palm Springs, it’s a definite step down: Whereas the earlier film had creative fun with a similarly familiar premise (in that case, a Groundhog-Day-inspired time loop), Brothers strains for wackiness and comes up with a scene in which a grimacing Josh Brolin jerks off a pot-smoking orangutan. 

Brolin and Peter Dinklage star as the Munger brothers, Moke and Jady, fraternal-twin burglars who come from a large family of felons and thieves. While Jady (Dinklage, rocking a sleazy horseshoe mustache) has spent the last five years in prison for a botched warehouse break-in, Moke (Brolin) has more or less gone straight: He’s gotten sober, gotten married, and become the kind of suburbanite who wears cargo khakis with a Patagonia vest. When the freshly paroled Jady shows up at a barbecue with Moke’s straight-laced, respectably upper-middle-class in-laws, his presence is anything but welcome.

But, as it happens, Moke has just been fired from his job for lying about his criminal record, and with mortgage payments and a baby on the way, he ends up agreeing to Jady’s offer of one last lucrative score. What he doesn’t know, at least a first, is that Jady has managed to get himself paroled by making a deal with crooked corrections officer Farful (Brendan Fraser) to recover some very pricey South African emeralds that the brothers’ long-absent mom, Cath (Glenn Close), heisted 30 years ago. He lies to Moke that he’s gotten a tip on a safe from a fellow inmate, and the bickering brothers set off on a two-day road trip with a planned detour to visit Jady’s hippie-dippie prison pen pal Bethesda (Marisa Tomei), who cohabitates with the aforementioned orangutan. (She prefers to refer to him as her “journey partner.”)

With the notable exception of Dinklage’s likably low-key turn as Jady, most of the performances in Brothers are broad, cartoonish, and flailing. Fraser’s Farful—who’s trying to get his hands on the emeralds to impress his dad, a corrupt judge (the late character actor legend M. Emmet Walsh, in his final performance)—is a yelping, red-faced, voice-cracking caricature. As Moke, Brolin spends most of the film looking either peeved or angry while being subjected to a string of indignities: manually stimulating a bediapered ape, fisting the ribcage of a partly skeletonized cadaver, self-defenestrating off a motel railing while wearing nothing but tighty-whities. (It’s almost enough to make one believe that the Illuminati are real, and that Brolin is being subjected to one of those humiliation rituals we hear so much about.)

Unfortunately, these antics aren’t enough to liven up a script (by Macon Blair, who’s better known for his work with Jeremy Saulnier) that’s mostly formula: the fraternal tensions, the twisty-but-totally-predictable plotting, the prologue with the how-did-I-get-here voiceover (which the movie ditches for most of its running time), the quirky dialogue, the unearned references to crime-movie classics (e.g. giving one of the supporting characters the surname “Waingro”). Not that Brothers needs to be novel. Its true shortcoming is that it isn’t very funny, offering only generic diversions.

Director: Max Barbakow
Writer: Macon Blair
Starring: Josh Brolin, Peter Dinklage, Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Brendan Fraser
Release Date: October 10, 2024; October 17, 2024 (Amazon Prime Video)