Brother

Takeshi “Beat” Kitano went to the United States of America to film this cross-cultural gangster Yakuza film. Takeshi himself plays an exiled yakuza hitman who lands in Los Angeles with a bag of stolen money and resentful of his banishment from the home country. He finds his half-brother (Omar Epps) and together they attempt to take over the drug trade in Los Angeles. A return to highly kinetic crime fiction, “Brother” finds Takeshi Kitano in a much more playful mood after the personal reflections of “Hani-Bi”. Whipping furiously across the genre tropes of the gangster film and the Yakuza film, “Brother” emerges as a highly satisfying ride with deftly executed sequences of violence and warrior mayhem. The cultural differences between the two brothers - one being Japanese and the other being African-American - allows for some genuinely funny reflections on cultural and ethnic misunderstandings, but nothing allows the action to stop for a moment. In Japanese and English with English subtitles.