There is little to say about The Brothers Bloom that isn't already apparent or expected. Its plot strands can be likened to a chain link fence, a netting of steel wire. The characters are puppets whose master, Rian Johnson, has positioned them to do whatever it is that is most clever and elaborate to do, the fleshing out process relegated to secondary station. That is my take, and I was vastly entertained by Johnson's prior debut film Brick, which tells the classic film noir story in the milieu of everyday high school kids who rap the textbook Chandlerisms and sollipsistic slang. Both of these films are all style. And I mean all.<br /><br />Mark Ruffalo totally absorbs the stylistic priorities, embroidering his otherwise natural cool with the spiffed-out black-suit-sunglasses-and-vice-substance image of the cinema's self- complementing criminal mastermind who lives luxuriously from the spoils of his aggrandized labor. This is a signification that builds up the classy ingenuity of the central con, which, though it absolutely has its definite laugh-of-mischief moments, is built up way too high. Adrien Brody is at times like the sensitive pragmatist who embodies the id with which we identify, as opposed to Ruffalo's avatar of the ultimate self-image, and they have likewise differing relationships with the respective women. The seeming turning point of the bluff- happy narrative is that Brody finds himself connecting with the millionaire eccentric played by Rachel Weisz, who makes a turning point of her own by revealing a certain penchant for madcap comedy. Brody and Weisz seemingly begin to have seemingly soft feelings for each other because they seemingly understand one another's loneliness and displacement. Meanwhile, there is Rinko Kikuchi, who actually plays another non-speaking character just as she did in Babel, but here she is Bang Bang the munitions expert. She has an almost butch self-assurance and dominant sexiness that speak for her, as opposed to her longing for acceptance in Babel.<br /><br />Then Robbie Coltrane comes in to play Robbie Coltrane, which isn't inexorably bad, and brilliant Oscar-winning Austrian actor Maximilian Schell is brought back from the dead to play Diamond Dog, some kind of Mordorian-looking mystery figure. He is in his first major English-language film in ages, and he is wasted here. That, as far as I'm concerned, is the only true crime to occur in the film.<br /><br />The other crimes---when the seeming brothers are children pulling their first big con, their scheme to seemingly masquerade as antique dealers and seemingly commandeer Weisz's fortune, the almost displacing effect it has by seemingly falsifying every reality it presents-- -for all their far-reaching wit and larcenous archery, boil down essentially to be just what we expect from a con film. And at any rate, considering the low frequency at which such movies have come out for the past few years, that's not bad.