Brother (Movie Review)

★★★1/2

Danila (Sergei Bodrov, Jr.), fresh out of the army, visits his brother Viktor (Viktor Sukhorukov) in St. Petersburg. Viktor is a hitman who's just been hired to bump off a Chechen mobster. He fears that this assignment will be a dangerous one, and convinces Danila to do it for him.

Lucky for both brothers that Danila is cool as a cucumber. He kills the Chechen and manages to escape being killed himself by jumping onto a cargo tram driven by Sveta (Svetlana Pismichenko), a married woman with whom he develops a relationship. The mobsters who had hired Viktor were intent on double-crossing him because he had asked for too much money for the hit job, and now they're out to get both brothers. Eventually, they find & rape Svetlana, and later capture Viktor, who betrays Danila by luring him to his apartment. But Danila suspects something is up, manages to get the jump on the bad guys, and saves the day.

Brother is very well made. It was shot on film, which would be nearly impossible to do on a $10,000 budget in America. (A lesson for micro-budget filmmakers perhaps? Shoot in cheap Third World places, if possible, because what money you have will go farther.) It has been compared favorably to Quentin Tarantino's movies, and for once the analogy holds up. It's not talky like a Tarantino film, but it had interesting characters, good dialogue, and quirky but plausible plot twists. Danila, in particular, is an interesting character: yes, he served in the army, but that's not what makes him so tough (he served his time in the Chechen War as a clerk.)

He's basically a good guy who helps out anyone he can who's being bullied, and yet he's an incredibly cold-blooded killer, too. The movie suggests a peculiar sort of morality, similar to what you'd see in a Tarantino film, one that's especially interesting to see in a Russian movie from the late 90's, when the country was indeed being ravaged by murderous mobsters.

Brother played at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 and spawned a $1.5 million dollar sequel, Brother 2, in 2000. The star, Sergei Bodrov, Jr., was killed by a glacier slide while making a movie called The Messenger in September 2002. He described his character in Brother like this: "I know that Danila is often blamed for being primitive, simple and inarticulate. In part, I agree with that. But I have a metaphor regarding him in my mind: I imagine people in primitive chaos, who sit before the fire in their caves and do not understand anything in their life except for the responsibility to eat and to breed. And suddenly one of them stands up and says very simple words that it is necessary to stand up for their friends, to respect women, to stand up for one's brother."

You can watch the whole movie for free online at YouTube.