Josh Brolin & Peter Dinklage’s Inferior Twins Riff Is Frustratingly Dull

It should be impossible to look at Brothers and not make a parallel with Ivan Reitman’s Twins (1988), because of the differences between its lead actors, Peter Dinklage and Josh Brolin. But there are far more similarities than that: there’s criminality, a debt-chasing villain, sharp flashes of violence (enough to earn it an R-rating, in fact), and a road trip to reconnect with an absent mother. There’s also the actual difference between the brothers: who they are inside.

The subtlety of Reitman’s Twins was not in mining the comedy potential of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito’s physical appearances as much as their different backgrounds. Mercifully, Brothers follows a similar trend, avoiding making cheap jokes to explore the sensibility clash between the delightfully named Jady (Dinklage) and Moke (Brolin). That shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone who saw Barbakow’s Palm Springs (itself incessantly likened to Groundhog Day).

It’s not the comparison to Twins that really undoes Brothers; it’s the one to Palm Springs, and it all comes down to how it’s packaged. Reading the top line synopsis – estranged brothers reconnect for a road trip to settle a debt and mend their relationship with the mother who abandoned them as teenagers – and then watching the next 88 minutes is as far from Barbakow’s debut as it’s possible to imagine. Unfortunately, it feels like Brothers’ cast deserved better.

Brothers Has A Major Identity Problem It Can’t Shake Off

Is It A Gentle Indie Or A Goofball Comedy?

The biggest problem for Brothers is its glaring identity problem. It feels like Barbakow’s gentler instincts are wildly at odds with the material a lot of the time, and it’s a shame, because there are good ideas in the story that end up crushed under the single most enduring image of a weed-smoking orangutan with a penchant for sexual assault. If I had a nickel for every time a comedy movie included a giant ape with no boundaries, I’d have three nickels, which isn’t a lot, but I don’t really want any of those nickels.

The story is by Etan Cohen, who absolutely knows how to get a laugh, and Macon Blair, who last combined with Dinklage on The Toxic Avenger in 2023. Both have uneven track records, with flashes of brilliance often undermined by baffling creative decisions, often within the same movie scene.

They are both all over this movie, in good ways and bad: Cohen’s heart, so evident in Men In Black 3, runs as an undercurrent in Brothers, but there’s too much of the needless slapstick of some of his other projects. As for Blair, there’s more of the dull comedy of Small Crimes than the indie vibes of his more successful projects, like I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore. And that’s the over-riding feeling for Brothers: it’s not exactly bad, per se, it’s just preposterously flat.

Brothers Misuses An Excellent Cast Of Actors

Almost Everyone Deserves Better Material

You really get the sense that with better material, the three main cast members could have been great. Dinklage is, inevitably, excellent and lots of fun as the charming rogue, and Glenn Close is a slightly underused delight as the twins’ mother, completely at odds with her powerhouse Cruella de Vil performance. She is written poorly and what is clearly an attempt to add intrigue to her means her motivation is bafflingly abstract.

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Josh Brolin, meanwhile, is a little lost; uncomfortable in his skin as the slightly bumbling doofus brother with a good heart. There’s a moment where the attempted humor zeroes in on the fact that he’s wearing only white y-fronts, and it came with the epiphany that Brolin is apparently trying to emulate John Cena’s easy, silly charisma.

Unfortunately, they all feel a little like they’re reading from completely different playbooks, never quite meshing as much as you need them too. The best moments clash Jady and Moke against each other, because their fondness for each other is the single most believable thing about the movie.

There is also, quite jarringly, precious little attempt to convince the audience that either of the brothers belongs to their upbringing, which I found ruinously distracting. Though not as much as the startling realization partway through that Brothers never actually does anything at all with the fact that Moke and Jady are twins. They’re committed to one another, of course, but that comes more from their shared abandonment issues, and Moke is far more logically presented as the elder brother blackmailed into submission by a younger sibling.

The whole project feels like stunt comedy casting: what if Glenn Close was a “trailer trash” matriarch? What if Josh Brolin was a gentle giant, uncomfortable in his own skin? What if Marisa Tomei was a gullible hippie who, for some reason, shared her “journey” with a diaper-wearing orangutan? What if Brendan Fraser played a sort of mash-up between Dudley Do Right and Boss Hog from The Dukes of Hazzard? This, quite plainly, is why those questions haven’t been asked elsewhere.

Fraser might be the most depressing part of Brothers. He plays the villain, a corrupt prison officer whose father (M. Emmet Walsh in his final role) is an even more corrupt judge who openly hates how much of a disappointment his son turned out to be. Fraser plays Farful as a Looney Tunes villain, again raising the question of who exactly was in charge of keeping the tone on track. It’s a performance that belongs before his Oscar win, and it speaks to a wider issue with acting talent mismatched with mediocre material.

So Is Brothers Actually Funny?

Brief Flashes Of Humor Can’t Fix Its Biggest Issue

That isn’t to say that Brothers doesn’t raise some laughs: some of the slapstick is enough to raise the odd smile, but they are few and far between. The gentler comedy of two brothers with very different sensibilities, and their outrageous career-criminal mother on a road trip is more successful, but it’s pushed aside too much.

That would have made for a good movie, and a more logical one as a follow-up to Palm Springs, probably too. Judging something for what it’s not is unfair, but this isn’t like that, it’s like there’s two different movies at war with each other in Brothers. Both are very different – like a conniving trickster brother and his big soft brother – but neither has the space to really shine, so the comedy moments are punctuation marks rather than organic additions.

Brothers is like the Farrelly Brothers tried to make a Coen Brothers movie. Of the latter, there’s the twisting narrative, charismatic criminality, and exceptional cast members playing unconventional roles, and of the former, there’s prat falls and profanity. But fatally, there’s not really a strong story, which feels like the reason for the distracting swerves into pantomime. There’s a bit of a whiff of over-compensation.

It’s hard to pick out exactly what was supposed to be funny when you take the slapstick away, and it occurs to me finally that Brothers was never actually a comedy at all, it’s an indie drama wearing a clown costume for no discernible reason. Everything that I found distracting can be pinned on an attempt to make this something it was never meant to be: the needless CGI ape, the cinematics that feel wasted, the over-abundance of physical comedy. But then, excess, family drama, and unwelcome guests are sort of the vibe for Thanksgiving, aren’t they?

Brothers (2024) is a film centered around the complex dynamic between two siblings navigating personal and familial challenges. Directed by nan, the movie explores themes of brotherhood, loyalty, and redemption as the characters confront their past and seek reconciliation.

Pros

• Peter Dinklage is excellent
• Some of the core story ideas are good

Cons

• Brendan Fraser’s Looney Tunes villain
• Josh Brolin feels a little lost
• The story is dull, and the slapstick doesn’t paper over the cracks
• Orangutan PTSD

Brothers is available to stream on Amazon Prime TV now.