OOne thing among many that Joel and Ethan Coen seem to instinctively understand is the art of giving their characters funny names: when and how to drop something pleasantly ornate, when to back off a little, how to throw it away so that it doesn’t sound self-consciously pretentious. It’s a delicate art; On paper, a character like Moke Munger (Josh Brolin) or his brother Jady (Peter Dinklage) might sound fun and distinctive. But if you’re not careful, your script will soon overplay them, labeling them as childhood mispronunciations stuck in your memory, and yet surround them with other characters with similarly nonsensical names like Farful, Freddie Unk, or Uncle Crabcake. The differences between these nicknames and real Coen creations like HI McDunnough (from Raising Arizona) or Burt Gurney (from Hail Caesar!) are as precise and important as the difference between, for example, the actual Coen brother Ethan Coen and the veteran screenwriter Etan Cohen . Who has a story credit for Brothers – the new film about Moke and Jady Munger doing one last job.

Like Ethan Coen’s “Drive Away Dolls” from earlier this year, “Brothers” is a road trip crime comedy. Unlike “Dolls,” it’s not an entirely wacky delight, even if it expresses those ambitions with its colorful backstories and would-be slate narration from Dinklage. Jady, fresh out of prison because the brothers had a job, was released by corrupt, connected guard Farful (Brendan Fraser) on the condition that he betray him to a missing prey who is the boys’ criminal mother had hidden for a long time. Moke, who escaped his last job unscathed, feels guilty about his brother’s time served and wants to provide some extra money for his growing family. His wife Abby (Taylour Paige) is pregnant and her wealthy parents already suspect that he may not be able to care for the baby. So the brash, scheming brother and the cautious, more emotional brother fight their way through some cartoonish, outlandish, unfunny antics. At one point a smoking monkey is involved.

The monkey is actually kind of amusing for a minute. “Brothers” offers plenty of short-term pleasures; Director Max Barbakow, who made the funny and touching film “Palm Springs,” frames some well-timed sight gags, such as a shot of Dinklage and Brolin in an accidentally synchronized escape. The script also adds a few funny lines in between all the tiring and tiring stuff. (Jady on why Dracula would defeat the Wolfman: “Wolfman comes once a month, Dracula always.”) But the writing is far less imaginative, lived-in, or off-kilter than you’d expect from screenwriter Macon Blair, who Jeremy Saulnier collaborator who starred in Blue Ruin and wrote Hold the Dark.

It’s probably not fair to wish that a zany, ultimately tender-hearted family comedy would be more like the bloody, brutal, pitch-black thrillers Blair has worked on in the past – or even a better approximation of the inimitable Coens. But doesn’t one of these films seem like a better use of Dinklage, Brolin, Marisa Tomei and Glenn Close, all of whom throw themselves in vain into their roles here? Surely Brendan Fraser deserves to play a big, roaring man in a proper Coen film, or at least one of Ethan’s goofy solo performances. For one of his final roles, Brothers even hired the late character actor M Emmett Walsh, whose numerous credits include “Blood Simple” and “Raising Arizona.”

None of this is enough to make a cult crime comedy out of almost nothing. On its own poor terms, “Brothers” gets by quite briskly; Minus the slow credits, it runs about 83 minutes, barely enough time to prevent autoplay on Prime Video. The strangest thing about it is how much time it spends inadvertently drawing attention to its own overwritten, underappreciated weaknesses.