Street food served in expensive crockery

Brothers
Hindi (U/A)
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Siddharth Malhotra, Jackie Shroff, Jacqueline Fernandez
Director: Karan Malhotra

Trailers enlightened us with a fight of two bloodthirsty brothers. While one is a schoolteacher, the other is an alcoholic street fighter. All they have in common are the blood and beard of their fighter father Gary (Jackie Shroff).

The hatred for each other comes after an alcoholic Gary kills their mother Maria (Shefali Shah). While David (Akshay Kumar) starts hating Gary, he also disowns his stepbrother Monty (Siddharth Malhotra).

While this Karan-Arjun drama happened when they were aged around 18 and 12, and Gary jailed for the murder, director Karan Malhotra doesn’t feel there is a need to show how they grew up.

You keep wondering about it when you find grey-stubble late-30s David teaching physics in school with wounds and scars on his face, and his brother Monty (Siddharth Malhotra) — god knows what he was doing for 20 years — still has hatred for him.

Next, an international mixed martial arts competition is announced and its organiser believes India has great potential like Gary (recently acquitted) to fight the world champions. You know what awaits next — our Karan and Arjun keep defeating the champions to reach the final and fight against each other.

The film lacks a storyline (nothing close to original Warrior). Add to that a snail-paced screenplay and poor direction, and the movie couldn’t have been worse.

Good music by Atul-Ajay and an even better stunt coordination by the team of Justin Yu and Eric Brown somehow save Brothers from completely being ruined.

Cinematography by Hemant Chaturvedi is nothing out of the box, but Akiv Ali’s editing mixed with a smart work of the special effects team make the bone-crushing scenes look real. Watch it for Siddharth — he is simply stunning from start to finish — and Shefali for her enigmatic expressions, but take a break if you are bored in the first half when the worst-ever item number springs up to bog you down.