Blood Brothers

Year:2007
Director:Alexi Tan
Cast:Daniel Wu, Shu Qi, Liu Ye, Tony Yang, Sun Hong-Lei, Chang Chen, Lulu Li, Jack Gao
Description:
Directed by music video director Alexi Tan, Blood
Brothers has an insane amount of talent attached
to it. Producers John Woo and Terence Chang should
be familiar names to anyone who's been around Hong
Kong Cinema for a while, and the assembled cast of
actors is very impressive. The film stars Daniel Wu,
Shu Qi, Sun Hong-Lei, Tony Yang, Liu Ye, and, in an
unusually commercial role, Chang Chen. The story itself
is a reworking of John Woo's classic Bullet in
the Head, but the setting has been shifted from
wartime Vietnam to 1930s Shanghai. What's intact,
however, are the same themes - brotherhood, honor,
pride, and betrayal - which the film neatly weaves
into its ninety-plus minute running time. But the
film lacks a noticeable passion or spark, resulting
in an empty facsimile of the heroic bloodshed experience.
There was thought and craft put into Blood Brothers,
but that effort never translates into anything substantial.
The short story: curtail those expectations, pronto.
Daniel Wu stars as Fung,
a country boy who travels along with his close friends,
brothers Kang and Hu to bustling
Shanghai to make their fortune. The three are good
friends and sworn brothers, and once in Shanghai they
get the chance to put that to the test. Both Fung
and Hu start as rickshaw pullers, but are soon introduced
to the swank environment of Club Paradise by Kang,
who works as a waiter there. Club Paradise is owned
by Boss Hong , who soon lets the hick
trio into his inner circle after they steal a shipment
of guns from a rival gangster. However, the trio's
brotherly bond begins to crack following the heist.
Fung is upstanding and a bit na飗e, and seems to object
to being a hired thug for a Shanghai crime boss. That
bit of moralizing puts him at odds with the power-hungry
Kang, who gets off on being a gangster, and begins
to exhibit a cruelty that's frightening to his friends.
Somewhat similar to Fung, Hu is uncomfortable with
their new jobs, but his loyalty to his brother is
a factor, too. Hu ends up registering his protest
by becoming a stumbling, useless drunk.
Fung's conflict is understandable,
as he's initially forced to violate some of his morals
simply to preserve the lives of his two friends. This
theme - the compromising of one's values for the sake
of your loved ones - is a potent one, and could explain
why the upright Fung still joins Hong's gang despite
his personal objections. However, that theme does
not explain why Fung behaves so stupidly. Despite
Kang being a lackey for Boss Hong, Fung is slow to
realize that Kang has drawn he and Hu into a criminal
scheme. You'd think Fung would notice a red flag a
lot sooner, but he doesn't even register a protest
until the smoking gun is practically in his hand.
Also, Fung befriends Mark
, Hong's number one lieutenant and potential
betrayer, in a spectacularly dumb way. Mark stumbles
out of Club Paradise, shot and bleeding, after a botched
hit on Hong, and shoves a gun into Fung's face threateningly
before collapsing in the snow. In return, Fung takes
Mark home and treats him nicely. Um厃eah, that's a
smart move, isn't it? Fung's innane kindness is ultimately
justified because Mark is a damn cool individual and
he's played by the charismatic Chang Chen, but how
is this knowledge supposed to reassure Fung when they
first meet? Why would someone as righteous and seemingly
averse to illegal activities as Fung help a potential
assassin?
This moment of illogical
characterization is indicative of one of the biggest
problems with Blood Brothers. The film's story
and characters are woefully underdeveloped, and the
filmmakers seem to justify its unearned narrative
leaps through an assumed audience acceptance of its
common themes and popular actors. Alexi Tan sets up
his players and their conflicts with rote, almost
textbook efficiency, and the manner in which it's
done is not as compelling as it is merely generic
- and yet the audience is still supposed to buy in
automatically. Tan's gambit fails, as the characters
never fully register beyond their generic stereotypes.
Fung is the righteous kid with a heart of gold, Kang
is the greedy bastard who'll sacrifice brotherhood
for power, and Hu is the weak-willed hanger-on whose
inability to choose a side ultimately proves his undoing.
Each character is recognizable, but so thinly-sketched
that they rarely affect beyond the most superficial
level.
Mark is also a very generic
character, since he's the Simon Yam/Chow Yun-Fat-stand
in, and Chang Chen embodies him with enough brooding
cool to turn him into the potential audience favorite.
Sadly, despite his coolness with a pistol, Mark is
a rather charmless figure, and doesn't even engender
sympathy in his romance with Lulu , Boss Hong's
girlfriend and the reason for his betrayer status.
You see, Mark loves Lulu, and she loves him, but Boss
Hong is the unforgiving sort who'll never let her
go, plus Fung is involved as sort of a "I wish Lulu
liked me" third party to the whole romance. This undefined
geometric figure of love is what ultimately causes
the characters to turn on each other. Basically, everyone
is unhappy that they've been emotionally betrayed,
turning brother vs. brother, lover vs. lover, boss
vs. subordinate, and even jilted lover vs. brother's
lover's boss. It's all very overwrought.
At least it's overwrought
on paper. Blood Brothers has a plot that should
create gut-wrenching, emotionally-sweaty conflicts,
but onscreen the whole thing plays out in an elegant
and strangely sterile fashion. The film possesses
a blocky narrative, with scenes jumping from one to
the next with little development or logical story
connection. One minute the three friends are nobodies
and the next minute they've become right-hand men
to Boss Hong. Likewise, Fung's close friendship with
Lulu seems to occur with almost no development, and
some characters perform actions that seem to be lacking
sufficient motivation. Boss Hong eventually discovers
Lulu and Mark's affair, but how this happens is unknown.
Instead of using that conflict to create tension,
it's just thrown out as exposition to get the film's
third act rolling.
In Blood Brothers,
characters are driven to extremes of emotion and action,
and Alexi Tan doesn't convince us dramatically. His
inspiration, John Woo's Bullet in the Head,
was famously overwrought and melodramatic, but it
depicted a hyper-emotional, chaotic, and lawless world
where characters had to make tough, sometimes devastating
decisions in the blink of an eye. Those types of decisions
are also made by characters in Blood Brothers
but there's no build up or felt underlying emotion.
The extremes in Bullet in the Head felt plausible
because the characters' desperation was so acutely
felt, such that when the film finally threw reality
out the window, it still managed to convince and affect.
In contrast, Blood Brothers feels rather cold
and even dull, such that characters and their actions
never seem credible.
The actors do decently, though
the shortcomings in the script and direction give
them little to work with. Daniel Wu is convincing
when acting na飗e or tortured, but the character's
righteous indignation is so nonsensical that Wu only
ends up looking silly when he drops his gun and asks,
"Why?" for the umpteenth time. Tony Yang doesn't get
to do much besides act dopey and drunk, and Chang
Chen, despite having the coolest character in the
film, doesn't get the chance to display the requisite
charm to go along with his character's omnipresent
brooding. Shu Qi is gorgeous but distant, and never
truly becomes sympathetic; at a key moment in the
film, Lulu gets to talk about a cherished memory involving
an old woman and her love for sticky rice, and when
the moment occurs it's astounding how uninteresting
and extraneous it feels.
Faring the best among the
actors are Sun Hong-Lei and Liu Ye. Sun doesn't get
enough screentime as Boss Hong, but manages to make
his character charismatic and subtly menacing. Liu
Ye overacts deliciously as Kang, easily outpacing
his more subdued and composed co-stars. Liu's character
is probably the most integral to the film, because
it's his "turning" that sets all this brotherhood
betrayal in motion. Liu creates more of a character
than the script really allows, as some vital narrative
support seems to be missing that would explain his
character's increasingly pronounced evil. Still, Liu's
performance is the closest the film gets to a passionate
one, and at least he's fun to watch.
It's passion that's ultimately
missing from Blood Brothers, though one could
argue that a film like this should be reverent and
powerful, like The Godfather. That wouldn't
be a bad way to go either and Blood Brothers
does have the look and feel of a somber gangland drama.
However, there's precious little beneath that look
and feel. The film could use some more felt emotions,
like the over-the-drop melodrama of Bullet in the
Head. The hyper-emotional tone of that film is
one of the reasons that it managed to affect as much
as it did. The over-the-top action helped too, and
Blood Brothers severely lacks that sort of
grand genre flourish. Only the climax offers up some
entertaining action, but the film up until then is
so unconvincing that watching these guys start to
own one another with pistols and machine guns is less
than cathartic. And before the climax, most action
sequences end mere seconds after they begin. For a
film so reliant on heroic bloodshed themes, there's
precious little heroism or bloodshed here; Blood
Brothers is just a collection of proven themes
rehashed in a pretty, but shallow manner that seems
only perfunctory. Blood Brothers just doesn't
convince, and indeed, is mystifying in its complete
inability to dig beneath the surface of its attractive
exterior. By any measure, this is a disappointing
film, but given everything that the film seems to
represent to the Hong Kong Cinema fan, Blood Brothers
is beyond disappointing. It's downright depressing.