The BROTHERS BLOOM

“THE BROTHERS BLOOM” (Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo & Rachel Weisz)

The easy comparison here is to ‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ - one of the 2 great Steve Martin films - & that’s one of the main reasons ‘Brothers Bloom’ fails.... It is NO
‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’.
Brody & Ruffalo play the title characters, Bloom & Stephen Bloom; professional con men.
Stephen provides the schemes & Bloom... well, goes along with them. Rinko Kikuchi
plays their nearly mute demolitions expert.
Beginning with the brothers as young lads, the film starts off slowly & remains inert until Rachel Weisz’s Penelope appears. Rachel provides what little spark there is to this bland, routine ‘con job’ caper, but even she can’t save it from dissolving into its own cesspool of blandness. For once Penelope catches onto the fact that she is being conned by the Blooms, she still sticks around to be conned yet again & again. You could understand her enthusiasm at wanting to become a member of the gang & join them in conning others, but she is always the mark & she continuously allows herself to be taken until she reaches the stage of appearing pathetic. It wasn’t humorous to watch them con her the first time & it became monotonous watching them screw her out of her inherited wealth time & time again. By the time the film reaches its conclusion – Is it another of Stephen’s cons being played out yet again, or is he actually in danger of being killed? - I didn’t give a crap. I didn’t like him, & I especially didn’t like Bloom since he was ‘pretending’ to fall in love with Penelope while constantly bilking her. I guess we were supposed to have an inkling of compassion for Bloom since every time Penelope tried to hand him a wad of cash he’d secretly return it. The meaning for this is never explained, the conclusion I drew was that he didn’t want her to just ‘give’ him money; he wanted the pleasure of ‘tricking’ her out of it... Like I said, this movie fails on almost every level.
Normally I would find it easy to blame Ruffalo for his dull performance as an excuse as to why I did not like one of his films, but here he actually shows a little bit of range, brings a little bit of life to his character... but then I noticed something else about Mark;
he is simply a bad actor & I didn’t buy him as the brains of the outfit for a second.
Brody, whom I normally like, is so one note in this, HE’S the boring actor. Only the two females provide any reason to stay interested & since Rinko rarely speaks, that leaves the major load up to Rachel, who does do a commendable job, but everything bogs
down as the storyline just drags along repetitively.
I wanted to like this movie but for a whacky con job story, it simply wasn’t funny & it wasn’t very clever as it would resolve its predicaments in a relatively dumb manner.
To close on a pet peeve of mine – Why would the casting agent hire a kid with a very small nose to play Adrian Brody’s character as a boy? I didn’t know which kid was which brother until they growed up & Ruffalo called Brody ‘Bloom’... & was his name Bloom Bloom, or did the older sibling just call him by his last name?
If you are fan of Rachel Weisz, you’ll enjoy her performance in this, but otherwise there is absolutely no reason to check out ‘The Brothers Bloom’.