Written by Rian Johnson

Directed by Rian Johnson


Starring
 Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody, Rachel Weisz

 

 

The Brothers Bloom

 

 

“The Brothers Bloom” is a sad attempt at showing us a con at work, but along the way it goes in so many different directions that it loses sight of the con, whch is an unforgivable sin.  Moreover, the most unlikely pair of brothers in film history – Mark Ruffalo as Stephen and Adrien Brody as his younger brother, called Bloom – have been running cons ever since they were assigned to foster homes as children  Now we see them as grownups planning the strangest con of all – a way to get $1.75 million out of a wealthy heiress who lives alone in a mansion in New Jersey (Rachel Weisz).  Why $1.75 million?  Why her?  Why not about a thousand other questions?  Did I say that she is a)beautiful and b)an epileptic, which we see just once in the film and are then expected to forget about it?

 

The brothers pass themselves off as dealers in antiquities, get on a boat that just happens to go from New Jersey to Montenegro and are joined on the boat by Ms. Weisz, who is apparently bored with her life alone.  Along the way they meet their old master Robbie Coltrane, minus an eye but loaded with menace.

 

From there I have to say I lost track of the plot, which did in fact take them to St. Petersburg and to Prague, where they try to get hold of an old book that rests inside the a church, and ultimately to Mexico.  I may have left out a country or two.  I guess I also forgot to mention that Stephen has what you might call an acolyte, a Japanese woman demolitions expert named Bang-Bang (Rinko Kikuchi), who doesn’t speak but does do Karaoke back in Japan..  In other words, there are two many people involved here, there are too many interruptions that take us away from the con, to the point that we’ve forgotten about the $1.75 million along about half-way through the film.  Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed the film, should have listened to his Sundance handlers and re-written the piece once again, taking out all the extraneous material that he put into “The Brothers Bloom.

 

 

 

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