The late, great character M. Emmett Walsh makes his final film appearance in the crime comedy “Brothers,” starring Peter Dinklage and Josh Brolin as thieving siblings who bicker while trying to pull off the One Last Heist that will send them into retirement can go. The role is a fitting farewell for Walsh for three reasons. One: Walsh plays a mad hatter of a judge who drives around his palatial estate, firing a shotgun and shouting — the kind of wildly caricatured supporting role that Walsh regularly crushed. Two: Walsh became a superstar character actor, as opposed to gainfully employed, after playing corrupt detective Visser in the Coen Brothers’ 1984 debut ‘Blood Simple’, then following this up with a hilarious cameo in their next film’ Raising Arizona”; the latter’s cult success spawned a mini-genre of cartoonishly violent but heartwarming slapstick comedies with thick, non-coastal American accents to which “Brothers” adds in its own gritty way. Three: Walsh was one of the actors who prompted Roger Ebert to coin the “Stanton-Walsh Rule,” which states that no movie starring M. Emmett Walsh or Harry Dean Stanton can be entirely bad.

“Brothers,” written by Macon Blair (“Blue Ruin”) and directed by Max Barbakow (“Palm Springs”), is far from entirely bad. In fact, it’s a pretty good movie that, thanks largely to the performances, has a lot more life than you’d expect given its concept and the formulaic way in which it hits the main story points.

Dinklage plays JD “Jady” Munger, who is not a genius but has a criminal mind that exceeds that of his brother Mike, aka “Moke” Munger (Brolin). Moke mainly serves as muscle in a series of increasingly daring heists throughout the boys’ youth. It is concluded that they went down this path because their mother Cath (Jennifer Landon), a career criminal herself, abandoned them one Thanksgiving to go enjoy criminal pranks with her no-account boyfriend, and nothing ever happened again. heard her children. In a twist that fuels many a crime thriller, Jady is caught during a robbery and has a hard time in prison, while Moke remains free and becomes respectable, getting a job at a fast food restaurant and marrying his girlfriend Abby (Taylour Paige). After Jady is released early, he tries to tear Moke away from the respectable new world he has built around him and drag him into a scheme to steal emeralds hidden in a safe in a clothing store in another town.

There are many more machinations going on in the script for “Brothers,” including the subplot about the judge and his son. They are both called ‘Farful’, although the elder is addressed as ‘Judge Farful’. Farful the Elder (Walsh) managed to get Jady released early so he could commit the emerald theft and get back most of the money from the sale of the stones. Farful the younger, played by Brendan Fraser, is a constant presence in Jady’s post-prison life, forcing him to put his fingerprints on an Uzi that can be used to return Jady to prison if he deviates from the plan, and him regularly terrorizes. keep him on a leash (Farful even talks about training Jady to be a grateful little dog).

I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to tell you that Mom is not, in fact, gone from the boys’ lives forever, and that Glenn Close plays her older incarnation, since Close’s name is on the poster and in the opening. credits and in advertisements for the film, and that the brothers will grow up in a few minutes and the filmmakers aren’t going to put age makeup on Landon when there’s an age-appropriate multiple Oscar nominee on the call sheet waiting to jump in and tearing up the screen (which she does). In films like this you know what the pieces are and how they all fit together. The filmmakers don’t hold back when it comes to showing the editing plan. There are heartbreaking confessions and painful moments of telling the truth where you expect it to fall, given what’s happening in the story at that moment.

What makes “Brothers” endearing are the believable energies that flow between the actors in both very quiet and very loud scenes (sometimes involving crashing vehicles and stunt people flying through the air as if shot by catapults). Like all players in the main cast, Dinklage and Brolin do not strive for documentary realism: it is not without reason that Wile E. Coyote is mentioned in conversation. These people are not finely etched, they are drawn on a wall with a magic marker. And they are losers in life. The film never lets you forget that for all their fearless/reckless momentum, these two are pretty small fish, and their exploits mean nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Dinklage is perfectly cast as a hard-boiled goofball. The more craggy his face becomes with age, the more serious he is, and the more pathos and hilarity he can wring from that innate core of dignity by keeping a poker face while his characters are beaten, humiliated, and otherwise treated like cogs in the battle. a crude machine. You also believe that he is almost impossible to shock: a reprobate for the ages. Brolin matches Dinklage in terms of certainty. He plays the more submissive and manipulable brother with absolute dedication, as if he were a 1990s Matthew Broderick asshole but in a muscle suit.

Close and Fraser aren’t on screen as often as Dinklage and Brolin, but when they are, they give the film jolts of energy that keep it from settling into too comfortable a groove. Close is an actress smart enough to keep you guessing as to whether Cath is capable of manifesting even an ounce of authentic motherly love (at her best, she plays characters you can’t quite read about). Fraser continues his recent string of knockout supporting performances by playing Farful as a man whose pathetic and self-destructive traits are plain for all to see, but is so big and full of rage (particularly at the awfulness of his father) that no one can see them dares to point it out because he can very easily break and kill someone. Paige does her best in a largely sidelined role, of a kind seen in many previous crime films that tends to be thankless no matter how good the writing. (Abby represents the normalcy that’s anathema to people like Cath and Jady — and probably to the movie.) Marisa Tomei reconnects with her “My Cousin Vinny” daffiness as Jady’s prison correspondent, who invites him over and to get started. gets for free. She turns out to be one of the most bizarre characters in the film, and that’s saying quite a bit.

Barbakow seems to have a knack for allowing artists to wander around in the fiction, offering their own moments of invention, but bringing them back when they’re about to get too ‘big’ or out of control and break the spell. During the climax between the main quartet of actors, an intensely personal conversation between the brothers is buoyed by the distant sound of Farful hoarsely shouting comedic nonsense at them, and there are several moments where Dinklage pushes an already funny moment into the realm. of the sublime with a wordless response: blinking rapidly, rolling his eyes, pursing his lips. (There’s a special art in editing zany comedies full of big personalities, and editors Christian Hoffman and Martin Pensa have mastered that art.)

About halfway through there is a scene with an orangutan that is so over-the-top heedless in its ridiculousness and its disinterest in anything resembling good taste that I won’t describe it here because it must be encountered without prior preparation. Let’s just say it belongs next to the hair gel scene in “There’s Something About Mary” and the scene in “Sideways” where the heroes are chased by a roaring naked man with his dangling flying. I therefore gave the film an extra half star. I’ll let you decide whether this is evidence of critical discernment or a cry for help.

Now on Prime Video.