That's my new favourite camel

For an hour and a quarter, The Brothers Bloom is totally ace. A well-plotted con-man flick with great performances, funny dialogue and great cinematography and imagery. Some have criticized the similarity in look and sound with Wes Anderson's films but I thought it worked really well here. OK, sometimes the quirkiness is overplayed, but I confess, I laughed at loud when Rachel Weisz was rapping and DJing. And I can see why the idea of a hard-drinking, mute Japanese explosives expert seems like it's trying too hard to be eccentric, but it plays just fine here.

The relationship between the principal characters is well set-up and feels pretty natural and uncontrived. There's a very sweet opening segment that shows the brothers as younguns, which sets up what follows nicely. And if you didn't already know, the film is writer/director Rian Johnson's follow up to Brick, which gave high school noirs a welcome kick in the pants a few years back. So far, all swell.

Problem is, like similar themed films, there's too much going on. The final act takes things in a different direction - is someone after the Brothers, or is it all another job? Even they don't know. It gets pretty convoluted toward the end, with there being a new "a-ha!" reveal every few minutes. It reminded me of 'Matchstick Men' from a few years back, which I thought was a perfectly okay film which threw in about six new twists in the last fifteen minutes.

So 'The Brothers Bloom' grabbed me, kept me, but lost me before the end.