I look at MGM’s 2024 slate and I am frustrated. THE BEEKEEPER got dumped in January in a decision that seemed mystifying. It ended up doing 150 million against a budget of 40 million, but critics and audiences adored the Statham actioner. What if it had been released during a soft weekend in the summer with little competition? One really need only to look at how Lionsgate’s summer slate imploded to see that there was a place for THE BEEKEEPER to clean up at theaters and be seen by an even larger audience. ROAD HOUSE was sent to die on Prime Video in March. The remake of one of the 1980s’ most beloved action comedies surely had gas in the tank, but Amazon was content to use a new Doug Liman action movie as chaff for their Prime streaming service. The critically adored MY OLD ASS was delayed into September and then sent out in an under-marketed limited release. Meanwhile, if I had a dollar for every time I had heard someone say RED ONE looks “like a streaming movie,” I would own a palatial mansion with a private movie theater that plays DEN OF THIEVES 24 hours a day. It looks like the most painful, dogshit movie. I mean, I might be wrong, but Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans’ CG-riddled mission to save muscle-daddy JK Simmons as Santa Claus inspires zero confidence, and RED ONE is the film getting MGM’s big winter theatrical push.
Into this landscape of mismanaged releases lands BROTHERS, a movie landing on a crowded weekend for streaming with multiple major releases from Netflix in the form of WOMAN OF THE HOUR and THE SHADOW STRAYS and the VOD release of ALIEN: ROMULUS and THE WILD ROBOT. Sweet baby BROTHERS, you never had a chance.
While I love the immediacy of streaming and the ability to keep my life free of one more layer of clutter in the form of Blu-Rays, I despise how streaming companies will often seemingly acquire films just to be a glowing button of possibility for their customers. Amazon seems to not particularly care if Prime customers watch BROTHERS, but as a customer mouse roves back and forth on a screen considering what to watch, BROTHERS represents a possibility. Well, I embraced the possibility.
BROTHERS has a pedigree that should attract interest, the follow-up feature to PALM SPRINGS from director Max Barbakow and a screenplay by I DON’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE’s Macon Blair. Both have previously demonstrated ample vulnerability in their work and a willingness to expose real emotion even in work that may feel cartoonish or far fetched. BROTHERS is a romp intentionally cut from the same cloth as Ivan Reitman’s TWINS. Like TWINS, this film also has an embarrassment of riches for talent in front of the lens. Josh Brolin, Peter Dinklage, Glenn Close, Brendan Fraser, Marisa Tomei, and Taylour Paige are a hell of a cast. All that and the final performance of one of the greatest character actors of all time, M. Emmet Walsh.
BROTHERS opens on a pair of mismatched twins who are left mostly to their own devices by their petty criminal mother and are eventually abandoned completely on Thanksgiving. After their mother leaves, they end up following in her footsteps with Jady (Peter Dinklage) as the brains and safecracker of the operation, and Moke (Josh Brolin) as the muscle. Eventually one of their heists goes wrong, and Jady gets pinched, while Moke splits. When the film jumps forward in time again, Moke has gone straight and has gotten married to his girlfriend Abby (Taylour Paige) with a baby on the way. Jady, who also serves as the film’s narrator in bookending narrations, is getting released from prison for “good behavior” because of a crooked prison guard, Farful (Brendan Fraser), and his crooked judge father (M. Emmett Walsh) want him to pull off a heist and give them the majority of the proceeds. Meanwhile, Jady’s plan is to pursue the emeralds his mother was trying to steal the day she abandoned her kids and to reunite with his mother, Cath (Glenn Close) and Moke. After a quick call to Moke’s employer, revealing his criminal past, the scheme starts to come together.
What follows has a deep Looney Tunes and Farrelly Brothers sensibility while occasionally veering into other, esoteric influences. There’s a sequence with a high speed chase between an earth mover and a herd of golf carts that feels equal parts Bugs Bunny and Mad Max. It fuckin’ rules. There’s an earlier scene where Jady and Moke show up to a large, rambling house with a wraparound porch covered in overgrown plants, and for some reason, my gut immediately thought of THE MAFU CAGE and then an orangutan shows up and well… to say any more about the orangutan scene would spoil the funniest thing I’ve seen in a movie this year. I laughed until tears came. Fraser’s Farful is played with a combination of explosive lethality and cartoonish weirdness that ensures you can’t take your eyes off of him. There’s a Hall of Fame for performances that never stop being scary and funny. Put Farful right beside Christopher Lloyd’s Judge Doom.
Yuks and hijinks are fine, but in order for them to really land for the audience, there has to be something beneath it that resonates with us, and for BROTHERS, that’s the idea that family fucks us up, and how we spend our entire lives wondering if these people that fucked us up really love us. If they do love us, does it even matter? There’s a moment late in the film where Moke asks Jady if Jady planned to betray him. Instead of replying simply with a “yes” or “no,” Jady says, “What do you think?” In this way, BROTHERS functions as both mirror and Rorschach Test. For viewers born into families with perpetual disappointment and tested loyalties, Jady’s response reads as sarcasm. For anyone lucky enough to not be in weekly therapy because of their family, Jady’s response reads as wounded offense. Of course I wouldn’t betray you!
Glenn Close’s Cath really helps sell the authenticity of Jady and Moke’s emotional wounding. Close is best when her interiority is cloudy but intriguing to the viewer. Think Close in FATAL ATTRACTION or THE BIG CHILL. Here, superficially, her motivations seem almost reptilian in their total lack of human empathy. She’s a person who seems expert at playing her children entirely as something she can use. That is, until she doesn’t behave that way. To a person who might not have had a fractured or toxic parental relationship, this might seem confounding, but this is less about Cath wanting to use Jady and Moke, and more about her not knowing how to love them.
The current state of cinema is that characters will often repeatedly announce motivations and themes to audiences at the risk that we might, God forbid, miss something from the shallow-as-a-rain puddle script. BROTHERS has a wonderful cast and lets the film’s themes trickle out without dialogue explicating them. There’s a moment when our heroes are gathered, licking their wounds, running from Farful and abandoned by Cath at a junkyard. While Moke calls home to Abby, Jady spends his time roaming the junkyard, gathering toasters and stacking them. Dinklage’s body language and presence in the scene is amazing: his eyes fixed on these toasters, taking in the wobbling spire he’s made with them. When Moke emerges from the junkyard’s office after making his call, Jady announces, “There are 22, 23 toasters, you figure one of them has to work.” The subtext of the dialogue is that Jady is telling us the reason he’s lived his life making the same mistakes over and over. He’s telling us the reason he betrays people and expects sincerity in return. Eventually, it has to work.
Beyond the core trio of Brolin, Dinklage, and Close, the rest of the cast is fantastic. The film has a chance to further explore its themes of toxic and hurtful families with Brendan Fraser and M. Emmet Walsh. A lot of the broad strokes of Walsh’s performance are easy laughs. He’s an ancient, screaming asshole, skeet-shooting from the comfort of a wheelchair while being abusive to his staff. But, again, beneath the surface of the performance is an explanation but not an excuse for why Fraser’s character is the way that he is. When we hear Judge Farful describe his son as “useless as a chocolate teapot,” we know the life and relationship that the younger Farful has had.
Marisa Tomei gets a chance to go big and zany in a way that filmmakers have been hesitant to have her do since MY COUSIN VINNY. She’s great, and the orangutan nonsense I mentioned earlier comes together because of her. If I have a complaint, it is that Taylour Paige is confined to a small role and not given much to work with. Her role is reminiscent of Laila Robin’s in another Thanksgiving-themed film, PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES. In both movies, wife characters seemingly only exist as these warm, loving carrots at the end of sticks for their long-suffering husbands. Paige is a great performer. BROTHERS has been completed since 2021, and two of Paige’s other recent films, THE TOXIC AVENGER and MAGAZINE DREAMS, are unreleased for very different reasons. I’m hoping producers will continue to take note of her star turn in ZOLA and cast her in bigger roles, because she can pull off more than the wife-on-the-phone scenes.
Talking about Paige’s films being shelved winds me back to my original point. There was an honest-to-god bidding war for this film back in 2021, with MGM winning. Then, three years later, it is put out on Prime Video with no fanfare to die. To be a button that people don’t click. To provide an illusion of catalog depth. It deserves better. This film, with its cartoonish excesses, more accurately captures my complicated feelings about my familial relationships than anything I’ve seen in a while. I want you to wait until Thanksgiving week, and once you are good and overfed and the battles over whether to watch football or parades have subsided, to throw this on your television. Let your family gather and see themselves, and if you are fortunate enough to have a healthy relationship with your family, then, friend, you still gotta see that orangutan scene.
Dug this review? Us too! Daily Grindhouse is stuffed full of this kind of goodness. In case you’d like to read any of the reviews name-checked above, here’s
Brett Gallman on THE BEEKEEPER
Jamie Righetti on I DON’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE
Jon Abrams on ALIEN: ROMULUS
And just for fun (the movie is not that fun), here’s
Jon Abrams on BROTHERS (2009)
them, not even once. When he’s not disappointing his cats he’s watching and writing about film.
His interests run toward naturalism, SOV and forgotten thrillers. Against his better judgment he
has hosted a podcast, Impossible Coin, for six years.
Tags: amazon, Amazon MGM Studios, Amazon Prime Video, Brendan Fraser, comedy, Crime, Etan Cohen, Glenn Close, Jennifer Landon, josh brolin, M. Emmet Walsh, Macon Blair, Marisa Tomei, Max Barbakow, mgm, Orangutans, Peter Dinklage, Prime Video, Quyen Tran, Rupert Gregson-Williams, streaming, Taylour Paige, Thanksgiving, William Tokarsky
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