Crime comedy Brothers strains for wacky, achieves hacky
Josh Brolin and Peter Dinklage pull one last heist in a film made for the generic streaming-content junkyard.
Photo: Amazon
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.