OThe one thing that Joel and Ethan Coen seem to understand instinctively is the art of giving their characters funny names: when and how to drop something pleasantly graceful, when to pull back a little, how to throw them away so they don’t sound. self-consciously ostentatious. It is a delicate art; on paper, a character like Moke Munger (Josh Brolin) or his brother Jady (Peter Dinklage) might sound funny and distinctive. But if you’re not careful, your screenplay will soon over-explain them as childhood mispronunciations that have stuck, nevertheless surrounding them with other characters with similarly nonsensical names like Farful, Freddie Unk, or Uncle Crabcake. The differences between these names and real Coen creations like HI McDunnough (from Raising Arizona) or Burt Gurney (from Hail Caesar!) are just as precise and important as the difference between, for example, the real Coen brother Ethan Coen and the experienced screenwriter Etan Cohen. which has a story about Brothers – the new film about Moke and Jady Munger doing one last job.

Like Ethan Coen’s Drive Away Dolls from earlier this year, Brothers is a crime comedy on the go. Unlike Dolls, it’s not a consistently daffy delight, though it telegraphs those ambitions with its colorful backstories and wannabe-wry narration from Dinklage. Jady, fresh out of prison for a job the brothers have put together, is recruited by corrupt, connected guard Farful (Brendan Fraser) on the condition that he inform him of a missing loot long hidden by the criminal mother of the boys. Moke, who escaped their last job unscathed, feels guilty about the time his brother has served and wants to provide some extra money for his growing family; his wife Abby (Taylour Paige) is pregnant, and her wealthy parents already suspect he may not be able to care for the baby. So the brash, devious brother and the cautious, more emotional brother bicker through cartoonish, bizarre, unfunny antics. At one point a smoking monkey is involved.

The monkey is actually quite funny. Brothers has plenty of short-lived entertainment; director Max Barbakow, who made the funny and poignant Palm Springs, features some well-timed gags, such as a shot of Dinklage and Brolin performing an accidentally synchronized escape. The screenplay also has some funny lines in between all the strenuous, difficult stuff. (Jady on why Dracula would beat the Wolf Man: “Wolf Man is once a month, Dracula is all the time.”) But the writing is far less inventive, lived-in, or strange than you’d expect from a screenwriter. Macon Blair, Jeremy Saulnier’s collaborator who starred in Blue Ruin and wrote Hold the Dark.

It’s probably unfair to wish that a zany, ultimately gentle family comedy was more like the bloody, brutal, pitch-black thrillers Blair has worked on in the past – or even a closer approximation of the inimitable Coens. But doesn’t one of those films seem like a better use of Dinklage, Brolin, Marisa Tomei and Glenn Close, all of whom throw themselves vainly into their roles here? Surely Brendan Fraser deserves to play a big roaring man in a proper Coen film, or at least one of Ethan’s crazy solo efforts. Brothers even brings in the late actor M Emmett Walsh, who counts Blood Simple and Raising Arizona among his many credits, for one of his final roles.

None of that is enough to create a cult crime comedy out of almost nothing. On its own meager terms, Brothers gets by smoothly; minus the slow-rolling credits, it runs about 83 minutes, barely enough to keep it from autoplaying on Prime Video. The strangest thing about it is how much of that time it accidentally spends drawing attention to its own overwritten, underexposed weaknesses.