Film review and film summary “Brothers” (2024)

The late, great character M. Emmett Walsh makes his final film appearance in the crime comedy “Brothers,” which stars Peter Dinklage and Josh Brolin as thieving siblings who bicker while trying to pull off the “One Last Heist” that threatens them enables retirement. The role is a fitting send-off for Walsh for three reasons. First, Walsh plays a Mad Hatter of a judge who runs around his palatial estate firing a shotgun and yelling – the kind of wildly caricatured supporting role that Walsh regularly destroyed. Second: Walsh became a superstar character actor rather than a professional one after playing corrupt detective Visser in the Coen brothers' 1984 debut film “Blood Simple,” followed by a hilarious cameo in their next film, “Raising Arizona”; The latter's cult success sparked a mini-genre of cartoonishly violent but heartwarming slapstick comedies with strong, non-coastal American accents, which “Brothers” complements in its own shaggy way. Third: Walsh was one of the actors who got Roger Ebert to do it , coining the “Stanton Walsh Rule,” which states that no film starring M. Emmett Walsh or Harry Dean Stanton can be entirely bad.

“Brothers,” written by Macon Blair (“Blue Ruin”) and directed by Max Barbakow (“Palm Springs”), is anything but bad. In fact, it's a pretty good film that, thanks largely to its acting, has a lot more life to it than you'd expect given its concept and the formulaic way it encapsulates its major plot points.

Dinklage plays JD “Jady” Munger, who is no genius but has a criminal mind that surpasses that of his brother Mike aka “Moke” Munger (Brolin). Moke acts primarily as muscle in a series of increasingly daring robberies as the boys grow up. It is inferred that they took this path because their mother Cath (Jennifer Landon), herself a career criminal, abandoned them one Thanksgiving day to enjoy criminal ventures with her unknown boyfriend, and never heard from their children heard something again. In a twist that underlies many a crime thriller, Jady is caught in a robbery and faces hard times in prison, while Moke stays free and gets a respectable job, getting a job at a fast food restaurant and his girlfriend Abby (Taylour Paige) is getting married. After Jady is released early, he tries to cut Moke off from the respectable new world he has built around himself and entangle him in a plan to steal emeralds hidden in a safe in a clothing store in another town .

There's a lot more shenanigans going on in the “Brothers” script, including the subplot involving the judge and his son. They are both referred to as “Farful,” although the eldest is addressed as “Judge Farful.” Farful the Elder (Walsh) managed to get Jady released early so he could commit the emerald theft and get back most of the money from selling the stones. Farful the Younger, played by Brendan Fraser, is a constant presence in Jady's post-prison life. He forces him to leave his fingerprints on an Uzi that he can use to return Jady to prison if he deviates from the plan, and regularly terrorizes him into keeping him on a leash (Farful even talks about turning Jady into a grateful little dog to train).

I don't think it's much of a spoiler to tell you that Mom is actually not gone from the boys' lives forever and that Glenn Close is playing her older incarnation, considering Close's name is on the poster and in the Opening is in the credits and advertising for the film, and that the brothers age into their adult versions within minutes and the filmmakers don't put age makeup on Landon when an age-appropriate multiple Oscar nominee is right on the list waiting to jump in and tearing up the screen (which she does). In films like this you know what the individual parts are and how they all fit together. The filmmakers don't hesitate to show you the assembly plan. There are heartbreaking confessions and painful moments where siblings speak the truth where you would expect them to fall, considering whatever is happening at that moment in the story.

What makes “Brothers” so endearing is the believable energies that flow between the actors in both very quiet and very loud scenes (sometimes with crashing vehicles and stunt people flying through the air as if they'd been launched from catapults). . Like all the main actors, Dinklage and Brolin do not strive for documentary realism: it is not for nothing that Wile E. Coyote is quoted in the conversation. These people are not finely etched, but rather painted on a wall with a magical pen. And they are losers in life. The film never lets you forget that despite their fearless/ruthless dynamic, these two are pretty small fry and their exploits have no meaning in the grand scheme of things.

Dinklage is perfectly cast as the hard-boiled idiot. The harsher his face becomes as he ages, the more seriousness he possesses, and the more pathos and hilarity he is able to wring from that innate core of dignity, maintaining a poker face while his characters are beaten, humiliated, and otherwise treated like cogs in one rough machine. They also believe that he is almost impossible to shock: a damned man for eternity. Brolin is as safe as Dinklage. He plays the more submissive and manipulative brother with absolute abandon, like he's a 1990s Matthew Broderick idiot, albeit in a muscle suit.

Close and Fraser aren't on screen as often as Dinklage and Brolin, but when they are, they give the film bursts of energy that keep it from settling into an overly comfortable groove. Close is such a smart actress that it leaves you guessing as to whether Cath is capable of showing even a shred of authentic motherly love (she plays characters you can't quite understand at her best). Fraser continues his recent streak of dazzling supporting performances by playing Farful as a man whose pathetic and self-destructive traits are plain for everyone to see, but whose anger is so great and full of rage (mostly over his father's awfulness) that no one dares Highlighting her because of him could very easily freak out and kill someone. Paige does her best in a largely minor role, as seen in many previous crime films, which tends to be thankless no matter how good the script. (Abby represents the normalcy that is anathema to people like Cath and Jady – and probably to the movies.) Marisa Tomei reconnects with her My Cousin Vinny craziness as Jady's prison correspondent, who invites him to stop by and meet taking care of him becomes free. She turns out to be one of the most bizarre characters in the film, which is saying a lot.

Barbakow seems to have a gift for letting the actors wander around the fiction, bringing in their own moments of invention, but catching them just when they're about to get too “big” or out of control and break the spell. During the climactic encounter between the lead quartet, an extremely personal conversation between the brothers is accompanied by the distant sounds of Farful hoarsely shouting comic nonsense at them, and there are several moments where Dinklage pushes an already funny moment into the realm of that Sublime with a wordless reaction: he blinked rapidly, rolled his eyes, pursed his lips. (There's a special art to editing zany comedies full of big personalities, and editors Christian Hoffman and Martin Pensa have mastered it.)

About halfway through there is a scene with an orangutan that is so over-the-top in its ridiculousness and disinterest in anything remotely resembling good taste that I won't describe it here because it can be approached without prior preparation must encounter. Let's just say it belongs alongside the hair gel scene in “There's Something About Mary” and the scene in “Sideways” where the heroes are chased by a screaming naked man with flowing hair. That's why I gave the film an additional half star. I'll let you decide whether this is evidence of critical judgment or a cry for help.

Now on Prime Video.