Recently, the local fantasy football league that I’m a part of had our live draft. It’s a pretty awesome little affair. Beer and great bad food is consumed, horrible words are uttered and a podium is used by both the commissioner of our league and last year’s champion. At the end of it, the guy whose house we had it at pulled me aside, asking me “You like bad movies, right?” He then rifled through his movies and gave me a copy of The Brothers Solomon to borrow.
“I only paid 25 cents for it when Movie Gallery closed.”
Having only heard about how legendarily bad the movie was, I went ahead and watched it. Soon, it became horrifyingly clear to me that Corey vastly overpaid for the film.
The quick and dirty: John and Dean Solomon are two socially inept brothers who set out to find themselves a woman willing to help them have a baby to grant their ailing father his wish to have had a grandchild. With a complete lack of self or social awareness, they spend the first half of the movie fumbling through every way they can think of to try find a woman willing to help them and the second half trying even more preposterously to prepare themselves for fatherhood. Along the way there’s an occasional subplot here and there to stretch this movie out from forty-five minutes to an hour and a half for the sake of distribution
What worked for Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber flops in this movie. Will Arnett and Will Forte have no sense of comic timing. In fact, there is even a slight pause between dialogue that makes it seem like they are either waiting for a laugh (that never lands) or trying to remember their next line. As the brothers continue their socially-inept dating schemes, they eventually find a woman willing to carry their baby.
Of course, that sets up the next 20 minutes of conception and sperm donation jokes and the next hour of the two training to become fathers. You can blame the writing on Forte, if you choose to suffer through Arnett’s and Forte’s cheers of ‘Make a baby for Dad on three!’ One Two Kill me. Don’t worry, there’s also a sky-writing sequence that goes on for 4 and a half minutes.
Situational comedy is usually supported by the characters, and we need to have some reaction to them — love ’em or hate ’em. Characters that provoke an emotional reaction tend to draw us in and make us laugh. We can only laugh at true stupidity for a couple of minutes before we start to feel just as dumb. Unfortunately for the filmmakers, The Brothers Solomon has nothing to support it when Arnett and Forte fail us. The film’s stylistic technique consists mostly of a three camera setup, providing one wide and two opposing over-the-shoulder shots.
While the stupidity might float us through the first ignorant encounter between the two brothers and James — the angry African-American — our eyes are glazed over by the time a naked Arnett embraces Forte, begging for a homophobic laugh. But no laughs are to be found here. The Solomon brothers are just too dumb to be funny.