‘Brothers’ (2024) movie review: Peter Dinklage and Josh Brolin are oddball twins in unusual caper

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A pair of obscure twin brothers from a family of thieves try to pull off one last heist in Brothersan offbeat comedy now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Can a stellar cast, including multiple Oscar winners, eight-time nominee Glenn Close, and famed character actor M. Emmett Walsh in his final role save what is essentially a brain-dead SNL-style affair? It is up to you to decide.

To give you an idea of ​​what kind of movie this is, the closest comparisons you’ll think of while watching Brothers is Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar MovieThe David Spade vehicle Joe Dirtand Jack and Jill— the latter is not the case for the quality of the film production, but because one can easily imagine a version of this film with Adam Sandler in both roles.

These lead roles are filled instead by Peter Dinklage and Josh Brolin, who happen to be twins, a fact that is never questioned by any of the characters in the film presented by this pair of very different physical presences. That the film subverts expectations for the kind of comedy that filled the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Danny Devito film Twins is in itself somewhat amusing.

Brothers opens with a flashback that doubles as an origin story: Somewhere in the deep south, 12-year-old twins Moke and Jady say goodbye forever to mom Cath (Jen Landon) when she comes home for Thanksgiving with the police in hot pursuit. Mom walks off into the sunset with boyfriend Glenn (Joshua Mikel), while the two brothers, learning all the wrong lessons, begin a life of crime in her footsteps.

30 years later, Jady (Dinklage) is just finishing a long prison sentence for robbery, while Moke (Brolin) has turned over a new leaf with wife Abby (Taylour Paige) and a child on the way. But after sadistic prison guard Farful (Brendan Fraser) blackmails Jady into carrying out another robbery, the new ex-conflict manages to get his brother into the mix.

Somewhere along the way, the brothers’ long-lost mother (now played by Close) reenters the picture, and the trio work together to find buried treasure. But the trust between them is long since eroded – Mom had abandoned the boys three decades earlier, while Jady let Moke take the rap at their former job, leading to his prison sentence. Will the trio be able to trust each other after all these years?

Maybe, but we have so little invested in these characters that it’s hard to build up much interest in their success. The muted, low-stakes script from Macon Blair feels like it was intended for a very different and perhaps more introspective type of film; what ended up on screen works more on the level of a broad comedy, but when Dinklage and Brolin bite each other, it works well on those terms.

But what promises really Brothers above the usual film of this type is the colorful cast of supporting characters, which also includes Walsh as Farful’s father and an uncredited Marisa Tomei as Bethesda, a hippie who forms a relationship with the imprisoned Moke – and shares a home with a large orangutan who forces himself on Jady in one of the film’s most memorable moments. And Fraser is a real highlight: his thunderheaded, frothing villain gives the narrative the kind of explosive energy it really needs.

Brothers is raw and coarse and feels mixed up in dirt both literally and figuratively; this film isn’t afraid to go places few other mainstream comedies would, and it basks in all the dirt along the way. But there’s also a sense of honesty about these characters and the world they live in: the filmmaking never places itself above these people in the way that mainstream comedies of this type can.

It’s also handled with unusual pedigree both in front of and behind the camera: in addition to a cast of award-winning actors who seem to slurp it up, it was directed by Max Barbakow, whose time-loop films Palm Springs was a critical darling and commercial success a few years back. There is little trace of that level of ingenuity or storytelling ambition in it Brothersbut instead a special kind of down and dirty charm.