Oh Brother
This alternative gangster film is primarily a vehicle for 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, and also his first film set outside Japan. Takeshi plays a hardened Tokyo gangster forced to flee to LA after his 'family' loses a gang war at home. There he meets his kid brother, a corner drug pusher, but is unable to lie low: his background as a man of action forces him to first defend his brother's gang, and later to expand their territory by - surprisingly - killing their rivals.
Brother avoids a lot of the tacky artificiality of Hollywood gangster films - no big car chases, slow-mo shoot-outs, excessively high-tech weaponry. Instead it provides a decent plot and some depth of character, almost always missing from those big box-office hits, and all without being short on the gratuitous death essential to the genre. Some of the action happens off-screen, jolting the viewer out of the complacency we've come to feel even to films of extreme violence. The realism, and the discomfort, is further enhanced when we do see the killing, as cold-blooded and efficient as we'd expect, but with gory attention to detail.
The cultural differences of Japanese gangster film are notable: there is not only discipline but a heightened sense of honour and some ritual mutilations and particularly suicides have a very Japanese feel. However, the feeling that Takeshi's character is an outsider in America is overplayed, and his image as an enigmatic foreign hard nut who speaks no English rapidly wears thin. His unlikely friendship with his brother's black friend is plausible, but sadly the elevation of a band of small-time drug dealers to bloodthirsty killers is not, and the film suffers from a lack of real characters apart from Takeshi.
Brother is not a bad film, and might be worth a look if you want to see a gangster film with more depth and less action, and don't mind being made to feel more than a little on edge. Ultimately, though, in spite of technical excellence, I found the over-realism and excessive death took too much from the film.
Neville Eisenberg
3rd May 2001