DESPITE BEING A YOUNG KID IN 4^th grade, I already could tell my friend’s mother favored him over his oldest brother. Various times when I was playing at their house, the mother and older brother would yell at each other. It was no longer a surprise when I heard a door slam in the house; it usually happened at the end of their yelling matches. I did not know the oldest brother that well because we had little interaction with him. He was with his friends or out of the house a good deal of the time. At the most, he played a board game with us five or six times. One time, I asked my friend why his brother and mother were always fighting, and he said his mother did not like his attitude. I was not sure what he meant by that, so I let it go. The thing I found so weird about the whole thing is the fact they would be arguing in front of me. I am sure every family has a disagreement/fight between family members, but I could never imagine having one in front of guests. It just seemed wrong to me because I knew how uncomfortable I felt when they were arguing, and I certainly would not want to have any friends who were over to the house to experience such a thing.      AS I GREW OLDER, MORE MATURE, and with the expansion of my circle of friends, I became aware of the fact that parents for the most part equally love their children. They may, though, show it in different ways and that is okay. A friend’s parents were always on him to complete his homework. They had a more hand’s off attitude when it came to his sister. Where they would sit with him and go over his homework, asking questions, and pushed him harder, they would only have to ask their daughter once about her homework, then never mentioned it again. I felt the parents realized my friend had trouble focusing on completing his assignments, so they took a more active role in his education. They did heap much praise on him whenever he completed a school task, encouraging him to do more. I always felt they loved him, despite him complaining to me how tough they were on him. This bond that forms between parent and child is also based on personalities. Just like we may be friends with one person but not with another, I think parents must navigate through a child’s personality and figure out how to fit in with them. Though I am not sure about the mother in this action, crime comedy.      WHEN A REFORMED CRIMINAL IS VISITED by his twin brother, who has a proposal for him that could be quite profitable, he must decide how loyal he wants to be to their mom’s favorite. With Josh Brolin (Dune franchise, Only the Brave) as Moke Munger, Peter Dinklage (She Came to Me, American Dreamer) as Jady Munger, Taylour Paige (My Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Toxic Avenger) as Abby Munger-Jacobson, Brendan Fraser (The Whale, Doom Patrol-TV) as Farful, and Glenn Close (The Wife, The Deliverance) as Cath Munger; this movie’s saving grace was the cast. The story is one most people have seen, but the actors did their best to create a different spin on it. Unfortunately, the writers wrote a generic blueprint of a story that was easy to predict and had average humor to it. I felt they could have pushed the characters farther to create more substance inside of each of them. There were several amusing scenes but not enough to always keep me engaged with the story. There is not much else to say about this picture except, I wonder what the writers’ mothers thought about it.                     

2 stars