By Maraithe Thomas, News Staff

There are certain expectations when entering a movie about con artists. In the case of ‘The Brothers Bloom,’ director Rian Johnson takes certain cliches like explosions, an impossible scheme and an inevitable and disastrous romance, and turns them into one witty and comical adventure story that almost manages to keep up with itself.
The movie opens with two young brothers ‘- dressed sharply in suits and hats ‘- as they move from foster home to foster home only to get booted for larceny and insubordination, among other offenses. Thus, they form a tight-knit bond. The duo is typical a con artist team:’ An older brother who is the brains of the operation and the younger, quiet one who is kind of along for the ride.
The first 10 minutes of the movie illustrate the inception of their first con as kids and probably the most interesting and perfect part of the movie. It’s also quite telling about what will happen for the next hour and a half. The older brother Stephen (played, when he is older, by Mark Ruffalo) pioneers a plan to steal pocket money from the neighborhood children. But his little brother, simply called Bloom (played by Adrien Brody), must make friends with them to pull it off and inevitably gets emotionally attached.
Fast forward 20 years to Stephen giving the old ‘one last con’ pitch to his little brother. He agrees, though his heart is not in it. The dynamic between them has stayed the same. Oftentimes in this movie, I found myself not paying attention at all as I became lost in the droopy, deep and soulful gaze of Adrien Brody. As a dedicated Brody fan, I might even say he went a tad overboard with the mopiness in this film. I got enough of that from Wes Anderson’s 2007 film ‘The Darjeeling Limited,’ to which this film has been heavily compared by critics, not only because of Brody’s floppy glares but also because of the overreaching theme of brotherhood.
The last con’s mark is a bored, eccentric heiress named Penelope, delightfully played by Rachel Weisz. She is undoubtedly the most enjoyable part of the movie as she plays a quirky, zesty woman who ‘collects hobbies’ from card tricks to ping pong and drives a yellow Lamborghini. Penelope is reminiscent of the quirks of Weisz’s character Evie in ‘The Mummy.’ This meshes well with Brody’s melancholy, and the audience can understand how he falls in love with her, even though it throws the outcome of their entire con into jeopardy.
This summer flick is up there as far as action films go, and moviegoers looking for a pleasant film they don’t have to think a lot about shouldn’t miss it. But film buffs will take note of and criticize Johnson’s tendency to wander too often into the realm of conventional directorial methods that try to be much more than they really are. This is reflected by the Wes Anderson mimicry and the plotline, which at times seems to run away with itself, aided by the feeling that the film merely came close to capturing true greatness.