Brother

“You Japanese are so inscrutable”. It is a relief when a character says this in Brother for Beat Takeshi always has me reaching for the thesaurus to avoid the dreaded I-word. In this cross-cultural gangster tale Takeshi, his granite features troubled by only the merest tic, plays a Yakuza exiled to LA. Once there, he wastes no time in showing his younger brother's team of incompetent pushers how to do violence the Japanese way, and in the process builds a criminal empire.

Cheerful stereotyping abounds –Italian mobsters sip wine and listen to opera while the Yakuza are never happier than when chopping off fingers or disembowelling themselves. Takeshi's story-telling (he also writes and directs) is as opaque as his acting, favouring a mix of violence, slapstick and curiously redundant scenes. While this has proved intriguing in his Japan-set films, it suffers from the move to Holywood movie territory where we expect more plot and less whimsy. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]