Fletch's Mini Film Review: The Brothers Bloom

I've always been a sucker for heist flicks. Good ones, mediocre ones - it usually doesn't matter. I love to see the way that the screenwriter and director put the story together, giving us a puzzle that is solved piece by piece - sometimes even having to move pieces around that weren't placed properly the first time around. They're like murder mysteries, only with large sums of money or jewels in place of death and blood.

Brick director Rian Johnson has no patience for heist flicks; he doesn't want to wow you with a labyrinthine story or fancy editing. Instead, he has a pair of brothers that he wants you to get to know and love, and he'll put them through the ringer to make that happen. This is a sentiment that ought to earn respect and admiration from the audience - getting a glimpse beyond the con (and con men) into the psyches of what makes these brothers tick ought to be a revelation, a stark contrast to the all-job and no character of a flick like The Bank Job. Yet it didn't. With little attention given to the task-at-hand, I was left with characters I didn't care about going through the same, tired motions ("I swear, this is the last job blah blah blah") with no pizazz.

That's not to say that The Brothers Bloom is all bad. Notably good is Mark Ruffalo as the elder brother to Adrien Brody; Ruffalo seems to be typically cast as a sensitive sad-sack, but he's given the chance here to play an engaging, charismatic, confident personality (fitting, given that he's portraying a con man, I suppose). Babel's Rinko Kikuchi is a refreshing site to see as Ruffalo's Girl Friday, a prankster who chooses her words wisely (the actress doesn't speak much English, after all), and Robbie Coltrane (Harry Potter) is always a welcome sight to see, especially when he's playing a guy that may or may not be Flemish - the only shame is that we see so little of him.

Fletch's Film Rating:

"Whatever."