About the best thing that can be said about The Brothers Solomon is that it's harmless. It's mild, familiar, and as inconsequential as a sitcom episode.
Saturday Night Live cast member Forte (who also wrote the screenplay) and Arnett star as two brothers raised by a single father in the remote reaches of the North Pole (it's explained…kind of). Because of their unique upbringing, they are, to put it nicely, naïve and socially inept. When they get it in their heads that the only way to help their aging father awaken from his coma (Majors, literally playing a lifeless body the entire movie) is to provide him with a grandchild, they embark on a quest to get someone pregnant.
Forte and Arnett have a strange and pleasant chemistry, but their "dumb and dumber" schtick has been done before — in, you know, Dumb & Dumber. But where Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels gave their characters a baseline of nastiness underneath their generally good-natured stupidity, John and Dean Solomon are hopelessly optimistic, wide-eyed buffoons — as John remarks over their father's hospital bed, "I bet he's thinking of himself as half alive." After they meet surrogate mother Wiig and her clingy boyfriend McBride (both horribly misused), the comedy setups are basically a movie version of Mad-Libs: They go to a sperm bank and ______ happens. Two single men hang out at a playground and ______ happens. You can, literally, fill in the jokes yourself. Even though there are times when Arnett and Forte take these standard setups into bizarre areas and earn a laugh or two, it doesn't happen often enough. Clearly, anyone who's seen Arnett on Arrested Development and even Forte's recent guest appearance on HBO's Flight of the Conchords knows they can do better than this, and it's frustrating to see them get bogged down.
As for Wiig, it's puzzling why they'd cast someone with her comedy chops only to have her play the straightwoman. Surely, someone else could have stood around and rolled their eyes. Wiig is given about as much to do as Akerman (who plays the standard "hot girl out of their league"), and that's a shame. Also, her presence only serves to remind us that we've already seen a far superior pregnancy-themed comedy already in the past three months. McBride's fate is even worse — all of his jokes revolve around him reacting badly to a perceived racial slur, and then the perceived slur is revealed to be accurate ("What? Just because I'm black I have to be a janitor?" Guess what? He is a janitor!). It's this type of thudding anti-humor that uses up any of the goodwill generated by the occasional bizarre, out-of-left field material that works a lot better. The movie almost can't decide if it's okay with leaving half the audience baffled (and the other half laughing) or if it wants to be homogenously "sorta" funny for everyone. More often than not, it errs on the side of homogenous, which is disappointing given that director Odenkirk excelled at the bizarre on the comedy series Mr. Show.
But, Solomon is a breezy hour and a half long, and it thankfully goes easy on the scatological humor — it has that going for it, at least. Otherwise, just wait and catch it during its eventual long cable TV run.
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