Why did I go to a movie that I felt I wouldn’t like only to have it cost me $111.92? In 70+ years of going to the movies there are probably 4 or 5 westerns that I liked and most of them made before the 1960s and, yet, here I found myself going to see “Sisters Brothers”.
The main thing prominent in most westerns is violence and it is here more visual than in most opening with a shoot out with bodies falling all over, barns being burnt and horses afire running.
The only thing missing are Indians and the scalping of ‘white men’ but we do get horses with men on them galloping across desert, mountains, going down from Oregon to California stopping in small dusty towns and a sophisticated hotel in San Francisco along with panning for gold in streams and rivers.
The Sisters brothers, Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) are hunting down the enemies of the Commodore (Rutger Hauer) while they are being hunted by John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) who has picked up a foreigner Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed) also wanted by the Commodore but who has come up with a lethal liquid to find nuggets of gold in the aforementioned rivers and streams.
These are not silent men but men who talk, talk and then do some more talking even when killing, lead by Reilly, big brother to Phoenix while Gyllenhaal talks with an indefinable accent and Ahmed doesn’t seem to have any accent at all. There are 2 women who have lines in the screenplay by Jacques Audiard and Thomas Bidegain but mostly females are shown as townspeople in background shots. Jacques Audiard, a French director makes his English speaking movie debut here.
There are a couple of scenes of violence to people and animals that most people will either turn their head away from the screen or just shut their eyes.
The movie is 2 hours, seemingly longer, with too many ‘scenic’ shots and certainly too many ‘speeches’. There are also two men in Davy Crockett type hats who really added nothing to the movie except being there for another shootout and flowing blood.
“Sisters Brothers” has a clever title but that’s all the good I can say about it.
(Oh about that ticket price--getting my ticket I dropped my phone, cracked the glass and couldn’t get anything to download!)