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80If nothing else, Brother confirms Kitano's stature as the most original purveyor of on-screen mayhem since Sam Peckinpah.
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75Kitano's most enjoyable, flat-out fun movie, provided you can stomach the violence.
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75It's a romantic fantasy of the gangster brotherhood and their doomed lives, executed with Takeshi's unique mix of stoic ruthlessness and giddy energy.
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70Brother is a solid return to gangster form for Kitano, who knows how to transcend the most overly familiar genre clichés without betraying the rules of engagement.
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70Mr. Kitano directed, edited and wrote Brother -- and his style of close-to-the-vest brutality travels extremely well.
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70A wizard at manipulating time, Kitano introduces staccato elements that interrupt the meditative pace even as they help set it.
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63When it works, which is often, Kitano's movie is an anthropology of the distinctions between Japanese yakuza and American gangsters.
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60Sags, lollygags, and blusters too much to sustain the what-the-hell momentum that Kitano achieves in his best movies.
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60Delivers some powerful emotional wallops alongside the chopsticks-up-the-nose violence, and manages the remarkable feat of making venerable American genre conventions seem eerily alien.
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50A typical Kitano film in many ways, but not one of his best ones. Too many of the killing scenes have a casual, perfunctory tone.
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50Disappointingly hollow.
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50Enough odd twists to be mildly interesting.
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50Beat Takeshi fans wouldn't think of missing this one. Moviegoers who hate violence wouldn't be caught dead at it.
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50Cool killers - Kitano's stock in trade - do not necessarily make for cool movies.
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50It's rougher stuff than most would expect, though not unrewarding in its own horrific way.
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50While Brother may be the perfect introduction for Kitano newcomers, longtime fans may find it superfluous and even a step down from the likes of Hana-Bi (1997) and Sonatine (1993).
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40While Yamamoto's bullets never miss, Kitano's attempt at tragic grandeur of "Godfather"-esque proportions misses to an almost embarrassing degree.
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38Wretch of a B movie.
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38Takeshi's elliptical directorial style here is overwhelmed by the script's crudeness and lack of narrative power.
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30The mix feels flat and the story remains a fairly banal account of underworld exploits whose emotional gears never fully engage.
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25Critics tend to fawn over the Japanese director-star Takeshi Kitano (a.k.a. Beat Takeshi), but am I the only one who finds his films impossible to make heads or tails of?
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20Watching this movie, you also have to ask yourself: Just how many acts of self-inflicted finger amputations do I really want to see?
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10Bewildering, tediously violent.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 3 out of 4
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Mixed: 1 out of 4
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Negative: 0 out of 4
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JamesM7Certainly not one of Kitano's best, but a great film nonetheless.