BROTHER (R) 2000
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SYNOPSIS:
May contain
spoilers... |
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Synopsis from Hoyts.com.au: When Yakuza gangster Yamamoto is forcibly retired from his clan after a hostile takeover, he flies from Tokyo to Los Angeles to find his younger half brother Ken, whom he believes he has been financing through college. When he finds that Ken has dropped out of school to run a sloppy drug-dealing operation with his buddy Danny, Yamamoto slaps him on the back of the head in disgust, then shows the motley crew how to take over the LA underworld, Yakuza style. In the most violent ways imaginable, Yamamoto transforms the ragtag gang into a styling posse of professional punishers and schools them in a kamikaze code of honor that puts all other forms of gang bonding to shame.
Gangster film starring Beat Takeshi & Omar
Epps.
Directed by Takeshi Kitano.
107 minutes.
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CINEMAS & SCREENING
TIMES:
Melbourne
CitySearch
Sydney
CitySearch
Canberra
CitySearch
WEBSITE:
http://www.sonyclassics.com/brothermovie/
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HEROIC-CINEMA'S REVIEW:
I watched over 100 people die violent celluloid deaths today. It may have got to me. 67 of those died by bullet, knife, bomb, piano wire and/or chopsticks in Takeshi Kitano's new film
Brother. |
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This is actually the first time I've watched a Takeshi Kitano film. Gasps of shock, shaking of heads, tuts of tut-tut. Calls himself an Asian film reviewer and has yet to watch the greatest living director of Japanese yakuza as he paint the walls red? That's pretty much the truth of it, sorry. |
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I thought I should tell you not because I'm compelled to publicly out myself as a no-good no-Beatnik, but because you should know that in approaching
Brother I can't do so with reference to Kitano's oeuvre. ('oeuvre' is a French word which means ' the other stuff he's done'. It's the sort of word you read a lot, but never hear spoken. That's because if you use the word 'oeuvre' in a conversation which is not actually being held in French then people are likely to call you a wanker. If those people have just watched
Brother, they are likely to call you a wanker and then jam a broken chopstick up each of your nostrils straight into the soft tissue of your living brain. And you'll deserve it, too.) |
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So, don't look for insightful comparisons to Hana-Bi or Sonatine
or any of that other stuff that's on my list of movies that I will watch on a rainy day. (At this point in my film-viewing life I can say with certainty that that day would have to be *so* long and *so* rainy that I would be better advised to spend it building an enormous floating wooden structure, large enough to house two of every surviving animal species on the planet, plus a 600-seater theatre with digital sound). (Interesting fact: In the
Brother credits, it states "Handguns provided by Gibbons". I don't think we should be arms-dealing with primates, do you?)
I better stop stalling and write this damn review already. |
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Brother is a sort of Coming To America story, instead the guy coming is a yakuza, and his American Dream is to make a boatload of cash via unspecified criminal activity which generally boils down to shooting someone else in the head. The blood in this film is bright, wet and red, but the humour is sharp, dry, and funeral suit black. |
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Our model yakuza is Sakamoto (played by director Kitano), or more commonly Aniki ("brother"). He's the kind of guy who says little, tips handsomely, walks straight down the line, and if you get in his way he'll glass you, step over your writhing body and then keep right on going. The death of his Big Boss in Japan (corpse #2) prompts a power reshuffle that leaves him with the choice of being in a coffin or being in LA. You might personally prefer the former option, but our antihero takes the latter, as he can look up his little brother. Said little brother is not dutifully in college as planned, but instead is "into some bad business with some black guys". Corpses #4 through #67 collect their toe tags as a direct result of two light slaps to the younger brother's face in the presence of the older brother. (Ooh, hang on, I don't know if there was enough left of corpse #43 to attach a tag to). |
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This is the general pattern: from little things big things grow. Aniki's trail of carnage is a dotted red line through every major demographic of the American crime fraternity, starting in the 'Hood and ending in Little Sicily. Said red line resides on a graph which does an
xy co-ordinate mapping LEVEL OF AMBITION to INSANE LEVEL OF RISK. The further you go up that dotted line, the less chance you have of getting back. The upside is you get to wear progressively nattier suits. |
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Through this all the film contrasts different forms of brotherly love, be that between brothers by blood, brothers by business, or brothers by
"Wossup?" Aniki is so doggedly loyal in this regard that you can't help but like the fella, even though he has an alarming ability to find a man's aorta with a switchblade in less time than it takes you or me to blink. |
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All of this jolly chat about body count and aortas and toe tags and such is my way of saying, man oh man, this film sure is one violent
sonofabitch. If you're not down for that, then maybe you should check to see if you can get into a session of
Harry Potter instead. Some of the harshest violence in it is self-inflicted (that brother thing again, but taken to an illogical and hella messy degree). And all of it is LOUD. Handguns are like cannons. Kicks are like wrecking balls. Punches are like car crashes. Car crashes are like - well, like car crashes. I think the punches are
louder. |
Did I like it?
Oh yeah. The rise and rise of Aniki and his crew is rivetting, in a hardboiled kind of way.
Did I love it? |
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Not quite. Everything is so larger and bloodier than life it crosses
into its own crime film world and is hard pressed to get back. One
character even remarks "Is that a line from a yakuza
movie?". And where else does the final showdown take place in a
collect-the-set American crime film than out west? The other aspect
is, that title again is Brother, not Sister. Everyone
is such a stoic hard-bitten crime archetype that there's not much
room to get into the skin of their characters - in this regard a
surprise coda warms up the entire film, but you have to go through
many a slaying to get there. |
Will you like it?
Sure, if the above piques your interest without turning your
stomach.
Will you love it?
Dunno. Depends. How many Takeshi Kitano films have you seen?...
Rating: Eight nasally-inserted chopsticks out of ten.
Reviewed by Mark Morrison
MORE REVIEWS:
David Edwards & Brad Green at Urban
Cinefile
Tom Mes at Midnight
Eye
Daniel Edwards at Senses
of Cinema
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