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Product Detail |
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Audio Format: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Video Format: Full Screen Languages: Russian Subtitles: English, Russian, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Czech Region Code: ALL Year Made: 1997 Running Time: 96
 Russian noir comes of age with Alexei Balabanov's Brother, a tough, taut, expertly made gangster movie about a baby-faced former soldier boy from the countryside (Sergei Bodrov Jr.) who takes today's St. Petersburg by storm, creating a trail of dead Chechen thugs and blown-away local mafia before hitchhiking by truck to his future destination. Where next? "Moscow!" he says with a crooked smile. Director Balabanov is brilliant at getting at the cruel, chaotic, anything-goes Yeltsin-era Russia. Still, the movie belongs to Bodrov, who previously played the nice young soldier in Prisoner of the Mountains (which was made by his father, Sergei Bodrov Sr.). In real life, the younger Bodrov is a youthful academic with a master's degree in Italian art history from Moscow University. On screen here, he's a primal throwback to Cagney in The Public Enemy and Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar, a charismatic killer with a wan smile, a goofy, junior-high-bully's voice, a dim intelligence, and a disquieting sweetness, which can appear on display just moments after he's saturated a seedy enemy with hot bullets. He murders and then he listens lovingly to his Sony Walkman: there's a great score throughout of throbbing Russian devil rock!
Young Russian Danila returns home after serving a two-year military stint and discovers that his big brother has become a hit man for mobsters in St. Petersburg and is deeply involved in a Mafia war. Wanting to help, Danila joins the mobsters to become his brother Viktor's assistant. Aimed a younger audiences, this ironic thriller follows Danila's adventures after he successfully completes his first assignment, the murder of The Chechen, a prominent crimelord. During the hit, Danila is wounded and ends up taken care of by a man known only as the German. Meanwhile The Chechen's men are in hot pursuit. Even though Danila spends the bulk of his time trying to avoid them, he also finds a few moments to have a couple of brief love affairs.
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