One of the recurring themes in this year's movies has been unplanned pregnancies and the contrasting responses of the mothers-to-be, or not to be. We have had Waitressand Knocked Up, and international festival award-winners Junoand 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Daysare on the way, writes Michael Dwyer.
THE BROTHERS SOLOMON *
Directed by Bob Odenkirk. Starring Will Arnett, Will Forte, Chi McBride, Kristen Wiig, Lee Majors.15A cert, gen release, 92 min
The Brothers Solomon - which really should not be mentioned in the same breath as films of such quality - takes a different spin on that theme. Its threadbare plot revolves around the last wish of a comatose man (Lee Majors, for it is he) that one of his two sons will make him a grandfather before he dies. The former Six Million Dollar Man has little to do but lie there while we watch his beard grow.
Will Arnett and Will Forte play the brothers in such swishy, over-the-top, wide-eyed performances that one assumes that they have been drawn as crass gay caricatures with no interest in certain crucial aspects of the reproductive process. It transpires that they are heterosexual, but utterly clueless when it comes to women.
"We used to try to enter women for ourselves - now we're going to enter women for dad," declares one of the brothers in a line indicative of the movie's puerile humour. Given their own evident arrested development, one would fear for the sanity of any child with the misfortune to be raised by either of them.
Various arrangements of John Parr's St Elmo's Fire anthem, Man in Motion, figure prominently - and pointlessly - on the soundtrack of The Brothers Solomon, which is so trashy that there's no fear of it ever being confused with The Brothers Karamazov. The cheapo production values are as tacky as the screenplay in a film that ought to have been fast-forwarded to the lower shelves of indiscriminating DVD outlets.
