Directed by Rian
Johnson
|
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. |