One thing among many that Joel and Ethan Coen seem to instinctively understand is the art of giving their characters funny names: when and how to drop something pleasingly ornate, when to pull back a little, how to toss them off so they don’t sound self-consciously ostentatious. It’s a delicate art; on paper, a character like Moke Munger (Josh Brolin) or his brother Jady (Peter Dinklage) might sound funny and distinctive. But if you’re not careful, your screenplay will soon be over-explaining them as childhood mispronunciations that stuck, and nonetheless surrounding them with other characters sporting similarly nonsensical names like Farful, Freddie Unk or Uncle Crabcake. The differences between those monikers and genuine Coen creations like HI McDunnough (from Raising Arizona) or Burt Gurney (from Hail Caesar!) are as precise and important as the difference between, say, actual Coen brother Ethan Coen, and veteran screenwriter Etan Cohen, who has a story credit on Brothers – the new movie about Moke and Jady Munger pulling off one last job.
Like Ethan Coen’s Drive Away Dolls from earlier this year, Brothers is a road-trip crime comedy. Unlike Dolls, it is not a consistently daffy delight, though it telegraphs those aspirations with its colorful backstories and wannabe-wry narration from Dinklage. Jady, just out of prison for a job the brothers pulled together, has been sprung by crooked, connected guard Farful (Brendan Fraser) on the condition that he cut him in on some missing loot long hidden by the boys’ criminal mother. Moke, who escaped their last job unharmed, feels guilty about his brother’s time served, and wants to provide some extra money for his growing family; his wife, Abby (Taylour Paige), is pregnant, and her well-heeled parents already suspect that he may not be able to provide for the baby. So the brash, scheming brother and the cautious, more emotional brother bicker through some cartoonish, outlandish, unfunnyish antics. A smoking ape is involved at one point.
The ape is actually kind of amusing for a minute. Brothers has plenty of momentary amusements; director Max Barbakow, who made the funny and affecting Palm Springs, frames some well-timed sight gags, like a shot of Dinklage and Brolin performing an accidentally synchronized escape. The screenplay slips some funny lines in between all the strenuous, try-hard stuff, too. (Jady on why Dracula would beat the Wolf Man: “Wolf Man is once a month, Dracula is all the time.”) But the writing is far less inventive, lived-in or off-kilter than you’d expect from screenwriter Macon Blair, the Jeremy Saulnier collaborator who starred in Blue Ruin and wrote Hold the Dark.
It’s probably not fair to wish a zany, ultimately softhearted family comedy was more like the gory, unsparing, pitch-black thrillers Blair has worked on in the past – or even a better approximation of the inimitable Coens. But doesn’t one of those movies seem like a better use of Dinklage, Brolin, Marisa Tomei and Glenn Close, who all throw themselves into their roles here to little avail? Surely Brendan Fraser deserves to play a large bellowing man in a proper Coen movie, or at least one of Ethan’s goof-off solo efforts. Brothers even brings in the late character actor M Emmett Walsh, who counts Blood Simple and Raising Arizona among his many credits, for one of his final roles.
None of it is enough to create a cult crime comedy out of almost nothing. On its own meager terms, Brothers passes by zippily enough; minus the slow-rolling credits, it runs about 83 minutes, barely enough time to stop it from auto-playing on Prime Video. The quirkiest thing about it is how much of that time it spends accidentally calling attention to its own overwritten, under-thought weaknesses.