If you think the 1850s California Gold Rush was all noble cowboys, shiny spurs, and dramatic high-noon showdowns, “The Sisters Brothers” is here to slap that nonsense right out of your head. Adapted from Patrick deWitt’s novel and directed by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, this 2018 Western follows two notorious hired guns, Eli and Charlie Sisters, as they ride from Oregon down to California to track down a chemist who invented a glowing formula for finding gold. It features a powerhouse cast led by John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Riz Ahmed, and it is currently floating around on streaming services like Tubi, Plex, Fandango at Home, and Amazon Prime Video for anyone brave enough to trade fast-paced shootouts for two hours of dusty bickering.
On paper, a Western starring this kind of acting talent sounds like a guaranteed slam dunk at the theater, yet the movie completely bombed at the box office, barely scraping together $14.6 million worldwide against a $38 million budget. Audiard even took home the Silver Lion for Best Direction at the Venice Film Festival, which usually tells you that the snooty art-house crowd loved it while regular folks stayed home to watch football. Whether you are a die-hard fan of Old West shoot-em-ups or just someone scrolling through free streaming apps looking for something with recognizable faces, this quirky, muddy road trip promises a very different kind of frontier justice.
Review by Ben Dover
Listen, I am 60 years old, my back hurts, and I have watched enough Westerns in my life to know when a director is trying to be too cute for his own good. When you put John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix together in a movie called “The Sisters Brothers,” you expect either a slapstick comedy where somebody gets hit in the groin with a shovel, or a gritty shoot-em-up where bad guys get plugged every five minutes. Instead, we get a two-hour therapy session on horseback directed by a Frenchman who probably thinks a ten-gallon hat is something you use to haul milk. Today’s youth will watch this and call it “subversive” or “a profound meditation on toxic masculinity,” which is just fancy talk for two grown men complaining about their daddy issues while riding through the mud. Seriously, kids these days need a safe space just to watch a guy brush his teeth, and half this movie is literally John C. Reilly discovering dental hygiene like he just landed on the moon.
Now, don’t get your panties in a bunch, because despite all the artsy-fartsy moping, I actually liked this movie quite a bit. The chemistry between Reilly and Phoenix is gold. Phoenix plays Charlie like a mean, drunk chihuahua who wants to bite everybody’s ankles, while Reilly plays Eli like a tired old hound dog who just wants to open a general store, get married, and stop shooting people in the face for a living. Watching these two idiots argue over who gets the good horse or why Charlie can’t stop hitting the bottle is genuinely hilarious. It reminds me of watching two old married biddies bicker at a buffet, except these guys happen to be stone-cold killers who can clear out a cabin full of men before you can finish saying “pass the biscuits.”
What drives me nuts, though, is how the movie loses its nerve right when things get interesting. Once they finally catch up with Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed, the whole plot turns into a big group hug by the river. Ahmed’s character wants to use his magic gold-finding juice to build some kind of hippie commune in Texas where nobody has to work and everyone shares their feelings. Give me a break! If you took a bunch of 1850s gold miners and tried to start a socialist utopia in Texas, they would have robbed you blind and left you tied to a cactus before sundown. And the ending? Without giving too much away yet, let’s just say the big final showdown with the villain gets resolved by old age instead of a six-shooter. That is a massive letdown when you sit through two hours of buildup.
Even with the soggy pacing in the middle and an ending that fizzles out like a wet firecracker, “The Sisters Brothers” has enough dark humor, sharp acting, and messy charm to keep you awake on a Friday night. It doesn’t glorify the Old West at all. Everybody is dirty, their teeth are rotting out of their heads, horses get mauled by bears, and nobody looks cool when they get shot. If you want John Wayne, go watch an old rerun. If you want to watch two grumpy brothers complain their way across California while accidentally stumbling into a conscience, fire this up on streaming. Just keep your finger near the fast-forward button whenever Jake Gyllenhaal starts reading from his diary.
Cast
- John C. Reilly as Eli Sisters: The older, heavier, and surprisingly sensitive brother who dreams of leaving the assassin business behind to open a quiet shop. Reilly, who also produced the film, proves once again he is way more than just Will Ferrell’s sidekick.
- Joaquin Phoenix as Charlie Sisters: The younger, louder, hard-drinking brother who embraces their violent lifestyle and constantly reminds Eli that they inherited their father’s mean streak.
- Jake Gyllenhaal as John Morris: A fancy-talking private detective hired by the Commodore to track down Hermann Warm first, only to get sucked into Warm’s idealistic schemes. Gyllenhaal uses a weird, overly proper accent here that makes him sound like a stage actor lost in the woods.
- Riz Ahmed as Hermann Kermit Warm: A bright-eyed chemist and prospector who invents a chemical formula that makes gold glow underwater. He is way too naive for the cutthroat world he is wandering into.
- Rutger Hauer as The Commodore: The wealthy, mysterious crime boss in Oregon City who sends the brothers on their mission. Hauer barely says a word, and sadly, this was the final feature film released before his passing in 2019.
- Rebecca Root as Mayfield: A ruthless frontier boss running a mining town who hires the brothers for a side job before turning on them.
- Carol Kane as Mrs. Sisters: The brothers’ estranged mother, who greets her boys with a shotgun when they finally show up on her doorstep.
Special Effects and Music
There are no flashy CGI explosions or fake green-screen sunsets here, and thank goodness for that. The practical effects are nasty, bloody, and painfully realistic. When somebody gets shot, it isn’t a neat little red dot on their shirt; it is loud, messy, and chaotic. The nighttime shootout at the very beginning of the film is lit almost entirely by the muzzle flashes of their pistols, which looks fantastic. There is also a terrifying grizzly bear attack at their camp and a gruesome chemical accident in a river that will make you wince. As for the music, composer Alexandre Desplat delivers a quirky, offbeat score filled with plucked strings, whistling, and mournful horns. Instead of big, sweeping cowboy themes, the music sounds playful and slightly crooked, matching the weird personalities of the two brothers perfectly.
Rating
Forget high noon showdowns, this is the Western where two stone-cold killers argue like an old married couple.
3.5 out of 5 Stars
Synopsis and Plot Breakdown
Set in 1851 during the height of the Gold Rush, notorious assassin brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters work for a powerful Oregon City crime boss known only as the Commodore. After a chaotic nighttime shootout at a barn leaves their horses dead, the Commodore tasks them with tracking down a prospector named Hermann Kermit Warm, claiming Warm stole from him. Meanwhile, a refined detective named John Morris has already been hired to locate Warm and hold him until the brothers arrive.
As Eli and Charlie ride south toward California, their contrasting personalities clash constantly. Eli is exhausted by the killing, obsessed with a newfangled toothbrush and tooth powder he bought, and fantasizes about settling down. Charlie, who is usually drunk, mocks Eli’s softness and insists violence is in their blood because of their abusive, alcoholic father, whom Charlie murdered years earlier to protect their mother. Along the journey, the brothers survive a grizzly bear attack that fatally infects Eli’s horse, get tangled up with a ruthless town boss named Mayfield, and wipe out multiple hit squads sent after them.
Meanwhile, detective John Morris catches up with Hermann Warm in San Francisco, only to learn that Warm didn’t steal anything. Instead, Warm invented a toxic chemical formula that reacts with gold in riverbeds, making it glow brightly so it can be scooped up easily. Warm convinces Morris to abandon the Commodore and become partners so they can collect enough gold to fund a peaceful, cooperative society in Texas. When Eli and Charlie finally track the pair down to their remote river camp, a group of rival prospectors ambushes them. Eli and Charlie team up with Morris and Warm to gun down the attackers, and the four men strike an uneasy truce to harvest the gold together.
The four men wade into the river and pour Warm’s chemical formula into the water, successfully illuminating a massive fortune of glowing gold nuggets. However, in the excitement, Charlie accidentally spills the caustic chemical on his hand, severely burning it. While Charlie screams in agony, Morris slips and falls into the poisoned water, and Warm dives in to rescue him. Both Morris and Warm absorb lethal doses of the toxic formula and die shortly after in terrible pain, leaving their dream of a Texas utopia dead in the water.
With the gold lost and Charlie’s burned hand turning gangrenous, Eli takes charge. A doctor has to amputate Charlie’s right arm, stripping the younger brother of his shooting hand and his swagger. Pursued by Mayfield’s remaining thugs, Eli single-handedly kills their attackers and escorts a weakened Charlie all the way back to Oregon City, fully intending to murder the Commodore so they can finally be free. When they storm the Commodore’s mansion, however, they find him lying dead in an open casket, having passed away from natural causes while they were gone. Eli punches the corpse a few times just to make sure he is really dead. With no boss left and their days as gunmen over, the two brothers ride back to their childhood home, where their mother lowers her rifle and welcomes them inside for a quiet meal.
Famous Quotes
- “You’re forgetting something. We are the Sisters brothers. We’re good at what we do.” — Charlie Sisters
- “You do realize that our father was stark raving mad and we got his foul blood in our veins? That was his gift to us. That blood is why we’re good at what we do.” — Charlie Sisters
- “It’s this world. It’s an abomination. An abomination.” — Hermann Kermit Warm
- “I left my family out of hatred and that my father was the person I despised most in this world. I despised everything about him.” — John Morris
- “I’m a good-looking man, Charlie. I’m just heavy.” — Eli Sisters
Interesting Facts
- Filmed Completely in Europe: Even though the story takes place in Oregon and California, not a single frame was shot in the United States. Director Jacques Audiard filmed the entire movie across Spain and Romania, using the Tabernas Desert in Andalusia to double for the American West.
- A Nightcrawler Reunion: This movie reunited Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed on screen four years after they starred together in the 2014 thriller “Nightcrawler,” where Gyllenhaal played a sociopathic cameraman and Ahmed played his unlucky assistant.
- Flipping the Brothers’ Ages: In Patrick deWitt’s original 2011 novel, Eli is actually the younger brother and Charlie is the older, dominant sibling. For the movie, the filmmakers flipped their ages to fit John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix, making Eli the older brother who looks out for Charlie.
- Rutger Hauer’s Final Theatrical Release: Legendary Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, famous for “Blade Runner,” plays the Commodore with almost no dialogue. It was the last movie featuring him to hit theaters before he died in July 2019.
- Major Changes from the Book: In the novel, Eli actually sneaks into the Commodore’s mansion and drowns him in his bathtub while the old man is rambling. The movie changed this to an anticlimactic funeral scene where the Commodore is already dead from natural causes, prompting Eli to punch the body.
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