The Whitman brothers haven't seen each other in over a year. Francis (Owen Wilson) invites his brother Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schartzman) on a cross-country train trip through the heartland of India in order to reconnect, bond and find themselves on a spiritual level. That's their internal arc. The external arc is to reunite with their mother who is now working as a nun in a convent at the "foot of the Himalayas".<br /><br />The Darjeeling Limited is actually a run-down train, the kind you would find in just about any third world landscape. The Darjeeling Limited (the Movie) attempts to mix farce with scenes of dramatic pathos unsuccessfully. For most of the movie, the three brothers are depicted as losers with a ton of emotional baggage, unable to resolve grudges they hold from an unfulfilled childhood. Unlike the Three Stooges (who mainly depended on quirky physical routines), there's little to distinguish the three witless Whitmans. Francis is the goofy businessman who spends most of the movie with his head wrapped in bandages after getting into a motorcycle accident prior to hooking up with his brothers; Peter is ostensibly running away from the responsibilities of adulthood as his wife is now 7 ½ months pregnant back home; and Jack is a struggling writer with a propensity for casual sex (he easily beds a stewardess on the train). Note there is a 13 minute short film on the DVD entitled "Hotel Chevalier" which illustrates the ending of Jack's pretentious novel.<br /><br />Act I concerns the brothers' unfunny vignettes aboard the Darjeeling Limited. The main bit concerns their smuggling a poisonous snake aboard the train which almost gets them thrown off by the conductor. Eventually, Peter accuses Francis of being an "Indian giver" after he takes back an expensive belt he had given him earlier. They get into a physical altercation which spills out into the passenger section. This finally gets the hapless siblings thrown off the train in the middle of nowhere.<br /><br />Act II switches to a rural Indian area where the brothers witness the capsizing of a raft manned by a group of boys. The brothers jump into the river, save two of the children but are unable to save a third. The brothers are about to take a bus but are suddenly invited by the villagers to attend the boy's funeral. Obviously, this is the scene where the brothers are supposed to 'grow up' and the audience is supposed to sympathize with them. In better screenplays, moments of sympathy for the protagonists come much earlier (usually at the beginning of the story). Here, the rescue of the children occurs at the midpoint of the film and it seems out of place with Act One's slapstick tone.<br /><br />Act III reunites the brothers with their mother, the nun in the convent played by Anjelica Huston. There's a lame joke about an escaped tiger eating one of the nun's brothers followed by the mother making breakfast for the brothers and then disappearing. Unperturbed, the brothers go up to the mountain and bond with one another. The final scene reprises the first: the brothers just miss the departing Darjeeling Limited and must jump on board just as the train pulls out of the station.<br /><br />The performances here are uniformly forgettable. The usually grim Adrien Brody should be singled out for proving that he's unfit for comedy. The leering Jason Schwartzman does his Ron Jeremy imitation and Owen Wilson takes a pratfall or two. Finally, there's the director, Wes Anderson, who must be castigated not only for his self-indulgence but for having a sense of humor that is thoroughly juvenile in tone and scope. Let's hope that some of the film's bloated budget went to helping some of the indigent local population who assisted the crew while working on this film. The true star of this misguided production was the Indian countryside and its people whose earnestness is contrasted with the shallowness of the film's creators.