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Cop Mike defeats another cop Marcus on footrace at the hospital:

Marcus: Look, all you need to know is that I'll be running down criminals till I'm 100.

Mike: You the last brother that needs to be talking about running down anyone after the hospital.

What does it mean, "You the last brother"?

I find these lines in Bad Boys for Life 2020

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  • Your cited text features the slangy / colloquial omission of the copula verb (You are the last...), as is particularly common in AAVE. Other than that, the construction X is the last Y [that would meet some contextually relevant condition] is an idiomatically common way of expressing surprise that as it turns out, X does in fact meet the specified condition.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Apr 14, 2020 at 16:27

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It means You are the last brother...

Ommision of the verb in this way is called zero copula and is a common feature in African-American Vernacular English.

brother in this case is not meaning a literal brother, it is a slang term meaning essentially "(fellow) black man / African-American".

As for the idiom X is the last (person/thing) to Y... - I find this a bit hard to explain, but it essentially expresses the idea that X is not naturally suited to Y, or would ordinarily be expected to Y, and therefore it is surprising that they do.

For example, "Ghana is the last place I would expect to find a snowmobile manufacturer" (because Ghana is hot and not snowy) or "Chris Brown is the last person I would expect to see performing at a feminist festival" (because he's a domestic abuser).

As to why Mike is surprised about Marcus running down people, I am not sure without fuller context of seeing the movie.

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  • You are the last brother means ?
    – David Lowe
    Commented Apr 14, 2020 at 16:28
  • I've expanded my answer.
    – stevekeiretsu
    Commented Apr 14, 2020 at 16:41
  • I don't think that idiom is particularly hard to explain. If you made a list of the countries where you expect to find snowmobile manufacturers, and you ordered the list from "most likely to find them" to "least likely to find them," the last country on the list would be the one that's least likely to have snowmobile manufacturers. So, "the last place I expect to find it" means the last place on that mental list.
    – Juhasz
    Commented Apr 14, 2020 at 17:30

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