Josh Brolin & Peter Dinklage in Sibling Crime Caper

The increasing predominance of streaming content over theatrical releasing continues apace with Brothers, a Legendary Entertainment production that distributor Amazon MGM Studios dropped into a handful of theaters for a week without critics’ screenings, ahead of its Oct. 17 debut on Prime. That strategy will likely turn out to be fortuitous for a mildly amusing feature that lacks the heft to compete at the early awards-season box office, leaving the film to find a less-committed audience in the streaming-verse.

Josh Brolin and Peter Dinklage play mismatched siblings with heavy jaws (enhanced in Dinklage’s case by a handlebar mustache) in Max Barbakow’s second feature, which finds him trading the subtler comic shadings of Palm Springs for ham-fisted humor, to disappointingly diminishing effect.

A brief setup introduces career criminal Jady Munger (Dinklage), who manages to lop a substantial chunk off his prison sentence for burglary and assault after cutting a secret deal with crooked Judge Farful (M. Emmet Walsh).

Under the watchful eye of Farful’s corrections officer son James (Brendan Fraser), Jady agrees to help retrieve and turn over a stash of stolen emeralds worth millions, which were abandoned years earlier by his mother, Cath Munger (Glenn Close), when she went on the run to evade arrest. In order to complete his plan, Jady attempts to recruit his twin brother Moke (Brolin), who’s trying to go straight after partnering with Jady on multiple heists that nearly landed him in prison too.

After the initial adjustment to Dinklage and Brolin playing twins, the inclination is to settle in for the familiar twists of an entertaining heist comedy. But those expectations quickly get upended by some ridiculously complicated family drama.

When Jady shows up uninvited at the baby shower for Moke’s pregnant wife Abby (Taylour Paige), Moke’s carefully compartmentalized life threatens to unravel — unless he can placate Jady by agreeing to apply his safecracking skills to acquire the emeralds. As the brothers set out on a roadtrip to pull off the job, with officer Farful in close pursuit, Moke little suspects the world of hurt that Jady has lying in store for him in a misguided attempt at familial bonding.

Jady’s intermittent voiceover narration attempts to stitch together decades of missed opportunities and hard feelings between the brothers, while Dinklage’s hangdog expressions and wheedling tone help weaponize Jady’s campaign of deliberate emotional manipulation.

However, any attempt at reconciliation gets sidelined when Moke discovers that Jady has been in touch with Cath for some time without telling him. Her sudden appearance after 30 years sends him spiraling into emotional freefall before both his mother and brother can reel him back in to focus on the logistics of the heist, which turn out to be far more unorthodox than any of them anticipated.

If their appearances never before suggested a family resemblance, Brothers will now inevitably link Brolin and Dinklage, who find fertile terrain for their less-appreciated comedic talents in the slippery sibling dynamic between the estranged brothers. Close proves to be inspired casting as the underhanded and unrepentant Cath, who shows barely any indication of maternal concern for her sons in a quest to get her hands on the emeralds.

While the premise suggests kooky fraternal comedies like Adam McKay’s Step-Brothers or Ivan Reitman’s Twins, Brothers lacks the quirkiness of the filmmakers’ earlier work. It eschews the winsome humor that Barbakow memorably mined in his Groundhog Day riff Palm Springs or the wackiness of screenwriter Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger.

However, they do deliver flavorful characters and rapid-fire dialogue for the supporting cast as well as their stars, giving Fraser a gleefully gonzo role as the anger-addled Farful and sending Walsh off with a handful of choice lines in one of the veteran character actor‘s final roles. Even Marisa Tomei’s cameo lands effectively as Jady’s prison-correspondence, long-distance love and the owner of pet orangutan Samuel, who develops a perverse affinity for Moke in one of the movies all too few laugh-aloud scenes.

Brothers is dynamically shot by Quyen Tran and energetically scored by Rupert Gregson-Williams (supported by a selection of ’70s pop hits). But 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.