Brothers (2024)

Synopsis

You’ve seen this story before. Brothers Jady Munger and Moke Munger grew up in a family of thieves. Jady’s the genuine bad boy, always dragging reluctant brother Moke into the next, and increasingly dangerous, escapade. The only thing they really have in common is a burning resentment of their mother, who abandoned them as kids to go stash a fortune in stolen gems with her latest boyfriend.

Once we leave the kids’ backstory, we catch up with grown (but not grownup) Jady (Peter Dinklage), who’s getting an early release from the prison term he received when he took the sole rap for a break-in with Moke (Josh Brolin). Jady’s wrangled his freedom through a deal with prison guard Farful (Brendan Fraser), whose dad (M. Emmet Walsh, in his last credited role) is a judge who has a hankering for those gems and believes Jady’s claim he knows how to fetch them.

Moke and wife Abby (Taylour Paige) have a kid on the way, and Moke has, very conveniently for the plot, recently been fired from his job at a diner. So you can fill in the rest: Jady takes advantage of Moke’s situation to lure him into that oh-so-typical “one last score”: to retrieve the fortune in gems that Ma (Glenn Close) has returned to claim.

So, no attempt at originality here. Movies like this live and die on how many wrinkles in the plot, how many jokes in the dialog, and how many sight gags in the action the filmmakers can inject. Enough to justify your spending 90-some minutes of your life watching?

Skip It

I have low standards, but there’s just not enough here.

For plot wrinkles, we do have the unlikely pairing of hulking Josh Brolin and diminutive Peter Dinklage as twins. Both are always watchable, though here they each deliver only serviceable performances, and no more. There’s no chemistry, even the bad chemistry demanded by the plot, between them. Still, it’s a bit fun to see the usual tough guy Brolin play the slightly wimpy and cautious brother to Dinklage’s career criminal with relentlessly bad intentions.

The dialog is splattered throughout with a few mirthful lines. But some unfunny stuff too, such as the sidecar foolishness involving a “monkey” (an orangutan, actually).

It’s the minor characters who gift us with the more memorable moments. Brendan Fraser is genuinely pitiful as the prat-falling prison guard who literally can’t do anything right. M. Emmet Walsh is his trademark crotchety self as the elder Farful. Marisa Tomei (in an uncredited role) is appropriately weird as the drugged out Bethesda who reads aura and has had some type of jailhouse correspondence with Jady.

But the scene stealer is Close as the mother who turns up years later (too late for Moke). You can tell she’s having a blast, bringing boundless energy to her role as the unapologetic mom who believes in doing what’s right … for her.

I did chuckle fairly consistently throughout. But any messages – about the value of family, the eternal bonds of brotherly or motherly love, or the significance of spending Thanksgiving together – are so loosely tacked onto a stereotypical plot that they fall away quickly. If you decide to give this one a spin anyway, I won’t take it personally. It’s your 90 minutes to waste. But I would advise you cover your eyes in any scene involving an orangutan.