Blood Brothers Review

In addition to the red carpet premiere festivities,  we also got to actually see the movie too.  I've been looking forward to it for a while, but I had also heard from a few people that there were some problems with the movie... so I went into the screening with tempered expectations.

But I have been interested in the 1920's-30's era gangster period since I first saw Zhang Yimou's 'Shanghai Triad'   (or was it since I first saw ' Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'?),  so I knew from the production stills that were published before the movie that the styling and period sets would be interesting enough to me no matter what.

At its face, the story is relatively simple and its been told many times.  Young guys from the country go to the big city to try and make their fortunes.  Inevitably one of them is more willing to do whatever it takes to succeed more than the others...  power corrupts and all that... you've seen this before.

It gets a bit more complicated, but I'll skip over the double love triangle details and cut to the chase:

Hsu Chi looked gorgeous in just about every scene.

As I mentioned,  I was predisposed to just enjoy the sets, the costumes and the dance numbers...  so for me, this was enough to enjoy the movie, but maybe thats not enough for some of you!

Daniel, Chang Cheng and Hsu Chi do a good job, but I think Liu Ye's character was the most interesting to me... I just wish it had been developed better.

Which brings me to the downside: The storytelling (and/or editing) come off as a bit choppy and lacking.  For example: You can't ever tell how much or how little time has passed since the previous scenes and the character development also seems to have been cut short.  Characters' motivations aren't really explained or explored...  Some stuff (like that movie studio scene!)  randomly comes out of left field and is never really explained.  (Tan's background as a music video director may explain this?!?)

Also in a few key spots the camera work is a bit confusing - rather than having a far off shot showing the relative position of two sides of a gun fight, they just have close ups... you don't know if they're 10 feet apart or 50...  (it reminded me a bit of the ending of 'Yamato no Otoko', where they obviously didn't want to spend the money on sets or CG so they avoid showing more than a 20'x20' area at a single time). :-P

For me, the costumes, styling, music and performances  were good enough to overcome these shortcomings,  but maybe not everyone will agree with me. :-P

I'll give it a 7/10.  OK,  tomorrow is a few 'after party' pics! stay tuned!  ;-)

ps - Its a John Woo production,  so you know they're going to have to have a big gun battle at the end...  bye bye fancy set! :-P