Excerpts from reviews of Brothers:
The entire first half, in fact, is unwatchable. Right upto the point of intermission, relentless melodrama is thrust our way with operatic zeal, complete with an excruciating, crescendo-driven background score and characters trying to out-wail it. It’s all tears and flashbacks and, funnily enough, it’s entirely unnecessary. The quickest fix for this truly bad film? Watch only the second half.
Actually, I must here apologise. I may here have implied that the post-intermission portion is any good. It isn’t, though the good news is that after such a horrendous first-half, it does at least feature some spiffy camera work and well-choreographed action sequences.
– Raja Sen (Rediff.com)
Brothers aspires to be a high-voltage sports film, but is unable to land its punches on target. This film is a perfect demonstration of all that is wrong with contemporary Bollywood potboilers. It is marred by poor scripting and unbridled overacting.
For all the hoopla, Brothers, in going for the jugular, punches well below its weight. It makes so much noise that any sensible point about brotherly bonding and filial fidelity that it might be trying to make is completely drowned out by the decibels. Take your earplugs along.
– Saibal Chatterjee (Ndtv.com)
Until intermission, Brothers is slow, bogged down by flashbacks and repetition. After intermission, we’re plunged into the R2F tournament, which is supposed to be tense and gut-wrenching, but ends up being hilarious and ridiculous.
The film exposes Bollywood’s terrible storytelling skills. All Brothers’ creative team had to do was translate Warrior‘s screenplay. Instead, this remake is an unholy mess that suggests the director has little interest in logic and even less insight into human nature.
– Deepanjana Pal (Firstpost.com)
While Karan Malhotra’s Agneepath was an updated version, Brothers is an outdated version. There is a difference between paying tribute to the 90s and making a film which looks like it’s from the 90s. Watching half-naked men beat the crap out of each other and a half-naked Kareena Kapoor gyrate in a sleazy manner is not my idea of entertainment.
– Aniruddha Guha (Dedh Minute Review)
The trouble lies in the way it is done. You can show sentiment without dowsing it in sentimentality. Brothers gets dragged down by its over-wrought mawkishness. The subplot involving Fernandez and a little girl with a serious illness is designed to jerk tears. And it has entirely superfluous songs, particularly an item number by Kareena Kapoor Khan which is so generic that she must have taken expressions and ‘thumkas’ from her previous ones and just rolled them out in this one.
– Shubhra Gupta (Indianexpress.com)
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