‘Little Brother’ Netflix Review: An Uneven Blend of Mayhem and Heart

I never fully managed to connect with the chaotic humor of Eric André, one of the most recognizable figures in American indie comedy. Let’s just say that the kind of cringe comedy he trades in rarely strikes me as particularly funny. If anything, it often feels like someone desperately trying to draw attention to himself through the most basic, aggressive, and parodically violent form of ridicule. Still, there’s a cult built around him—he’s an influence on dozens of YouTubers and influencers—and that likely led someone to think that pairing him with John Cena, a much more mainstream and widely popular muscular actor/comedian and former wrestler, could work. Little Brother is Netflix’s attempt to bring those two sensibilities together in a comedy that recalls the early style of the Farrelly Brothers, and that only works sporadically, in those moments when the distant planets of both performers happen to align.

André plays Marcus Pinchel, a man who escapes from the psychiatric clinic where he lives and sets out in search of his “big brother,” who resides in New York. That “brother” is Rudd (Cena), a real estate salesman who dreams of landing a spot on a reality show about buying and selling homes. Married to the kind and gentle Deirdre (Michelle Monaghan) and father of two teenage children, Rudd is frustrated by the success of his own older brother, Josh (Christopher Meloni), a multimillionaire and something of a New York nightlife king. One day, Rudd receives a call saying his brother has had an accident, but when he arrives at the hospital he finds Marcus instead, a man he doesn’t recognize. Who is this person claiming to be his brother?

It soon becomes clear that Marcus is a kid Rudd briefly sponsored through a charity program back in high school—someone he completely forgot. Marcus, however, never forgot him: a life spent in foster homes left him clinging to the idea of this “brother,” and, through an online mix-up, he kept believing they maintained a virtual relationship. Deirdre suggests that the injured Marcus stay with them for a few days, and, predictably, this unpredictable agent of chaos barges into Rudd’s life, his family, and his attempts to make it on television, derailing—or at least radically reshaping—his plans with his wild behavior and ideas. Rudd tries to rein him in, but the task proves impossible. The comedy emerges—or should emerge—from the frustrations of this calculated, seemingly insensitive man watching everything he has carefully mapped out fall apart thanks to his “little brother.”

Matt Spicer, who previously directed the sharper, more incisive Ingrid Goes West, works here from a script by Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel that follows a classic narrative model: the disruptive outsider who first threatens and then ultimately fixes the life of a man who doesn’t realize he’s in trouble. It also relies on an equally traditional comic pairing—the straight man trying to maintain order and his chaotic counterpart who appears to destroy everything he touches. In between, there’s a kind of parody of reality television, built around the absurd show the two eventually take part in. And, as is often the case with post-Farrelly comedies, there’s plenty of sexual humor—somewhere between adolescent and crude (for some reason, many of these scenes take place in cars)—that may provoke an extra smile, but not much more.

It’s a model that worked in the 1930s, again in the ’80s (via John Hughes), and resurfaced in the 2000s as part of the wave of American studio comedies. Little Brother arrives a bit late to that cycle and fails to bring a fresh twist to its material, beyond its attempts to engage with the world of reality shows and their manufactured “reality.” When a key scene unfolds simultaneously within the film’s fictional world and inside the show the characters are working on, it becomes clear that there isn’t much difference between the two. Rather than parodying that universe, the film mostly replicates the same comedic and dramatic codes of trash TV. There may be a faint metalinguistic gesture somewhere in there—André’s anti-humor often operates in that territory—but ultimately everything ends up looking far too much like itself.