Critic Reviews

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.

It’s a pretty good movie that, thanks mainly to its performances, has a lot more life than you might expect, given the concept and the formulaic way that it hits its major story points.

Brothers takes a tediously familiar comedy story structure and hangs some genuinely interesting characters and performances on it. It’s like a Frankenstein monster made out of Raising Arizona and Dumb and Dumber To.

Brothers is a largely enjoyable comedy, predominantly thanks to its talented central duo and smart direction by Barbakow, though it admittedly suffers from a host of issues baked into the script itself.

For a movie that aspires to antic comedy, it brings way too much casting firepower to a slim plot and even sketchier character development. Whether a streaming audience will even notice the mis-calibration is probably irrelevant, as long as they remember the mismatched brothers.

Some of it works, too much of it doesn’t. The pacing is fast enough in stretches, the performances amusingly broad and the pratfuls and punches sometimes amuse.

Its true shortcoming is that it isn’t very funny, offering only generic diversions.

For a road-trip buddy comedy, a greater crime than being unfunny is perhaps, amid all of the shenanigans, being dull. That is partly the feeling one is left with in the R-rated movie Brothers, which, even with an A-list cast, seems to move on autopilot through all of its pit stops.

While the entire ensemble comes across fully committed to roles that are well beneath them, it’s not at all clear what the point was in presenting the Moke and Jady characters as twins.

The quirkiest thing about it is how much of that time it spends accidentally calling attention to its own overwritten, under-thought weaknesses.