Movie Review: Brothers

DIRECTOR: Karan Malhotra
STARRING: Akshay Kumar, Sidharth Malhotra, Jacqueline
Fernandez, Jackie Shroff, Shefali Shah
RATING: 2 stars

Excessive running last week had dislocated my knee cap
and it hurts. BADLY
. And then I go and watch the
gorefest Brothers where bones are crunched mercilessly,
shoulders are broken pitilessly, causing a relationship
between my palm and knee. It's still caressing the
broken joint!!

Brothers was made by putting the DVD of Warrior in a
Xerox machine. Alas the paper got stuck, the Xerox
machine's ink expired and what came out was a bad,
melodramatic, manipulative, painfully long version of the
original.

Papa Gary is cranky. Cranky has two sons, Grumpy
(David) and Grouchy (Monty). Grumpy is a Physics
teacher. Grouchy is... ummm... just grouchy. And besides
being forever upset, they have one more thing in
common: they all are fighters.

The first half establishes the characters.

Cranky was a fighter who destroyed his life and family
by excessive drinking. He even strays in marriage. His
wife is Maria, played by Shefali Shah who has moved
from one dysfunctional family to the other, alas from a
yacht to a 'Kohli'. But her million expressions remain
intact. Don't get me wrong. She is a fine actor but her
big eyes are like Hrithik Roshan's nostrils, fluttering and
fluffing a bit too much. Calm down, don't exhaust all
your expressions. This is not your last film.

Grumpy is your cool teacher with tattoos. There is a
tattoo for everything. A cross. Oh, he is a Christian.
Roman numbers tattoo on his chest. Oh Roman Catholic.
A wild bird tattoo on the neck. MMA fighter hence
established. That's not all. The director has very smartly
dealt with Akshay's famous problem of forgetting his
lines. He has engraved the films script all over his torso!
Grouchy is Guru reloaded. He still seems to be on the
sets of Ek Villain . Sidharth-now-available-in-a-beard-
Malhotra has worked hard on his physique. And that's
only fair. Who cares about body of work when you have
a body to flaunt?
There is tension between Cranky and Grumpy.

It takes
them 62 songs and 51 flashbacks to address what the
issue is. It's an emotional story, I agree, but done so
painfully slow that I could see Akshay Kumar's beard
grow and turn white.

The second half is like a WWF YouTube that never ends!
It’s an MMF fight, a sport I don’t know much about.

Educate me. Engage me. I didn’t care about hockey,
but Chak De India made me fall in love with the national
sport. We know both the brothers will reach the final
and full sacrifice for bhaiyya will happen, emotions will
run high, and scenes will be written to cajole a tear or
two. But I knew Bhuvan and his team would win the
match in Lagaan , yet I sat on the edge of my seat with
my heart hanging in my mouth as that gora took the
catch, thankfully beyond the boundary.
In Brothers, between David and Monty, I cheered for the
end of the film. I wanted it to get over so that I could go
check out the sale in the mall.
Our Grumpy and Grouchy looked so incompetent in front
of the international line up of fighters. Against the
Shaolin fighter, the Olympic winner, the MMA fighter, we
had a Physics teacher and a fighter who has been a
YouTube sensation. Errr what???
Jacqueline Fernandes looked gorgeous. She can emote
too. Her unsaid mere suhaag ko chod de
kutte expression towards the end of the movie is epic!!
Brothers, despite being a powerful story, lost the plot in
the telling.
I suggest get a DVD of Warrior instead.