What is up with the low rating?

I gave it a 5 on looks alone. It's a very pretty movie, but the characters are worthless.

Our hero refuses to kill people, but has no problem being a hesitant admirer of the Boss' girl. Fung goes to Shanghai with Hu and Kang in order to make money to buy Su Zhen's debt and help his mother get better. However, once he starts making money, he totally neglects his so-called driving force in order to pursue an unavailable woman who he doesn't even have the courage to properly court. Instead, he slinks about in the shadows, whispering lines in her ear. And then he's supposed to be this fantastic gunslinger, but it never explains how he's gotten so good when he's clearly skittish around guns. And the last 30min where he fights alongside Mark is ridiculous - there was no reason for him to avenge Hu after he had already ran back home to hide amongst his family. His last minute change of heart to spare Kang is just another example of his inability to make any real decision.

I guess Boss Hong is the main villain, but it's almost cartoonish. His cover is being a movie director, but, in the few scenes dealing with movie equipment or whatnot, he's nowhere to be found (Feng and Lulu shoot at the warehouse, Lulu pulls Feng to see the actresses, and Lulu tells Feng that she wants to be an actress). They could have totally cut those scenes out as they added nothing to either character - Lulu is a singer/dancer at Boss Hong's nightclub which should have been his only cover. There seems to be no rhyme or reason behind any of Boss Hong's orders and it never shows him being the slight bit suspicious of Lulu until he orders her death.

Mark's character is completely unneccesary beyond providing a foil for Boss Hong and it's not even a good foil. He gets maybe 10min screentime, but he's supposed to be a main character! His dialogue is limited to grunts and his facial expression never really wavers from a scowl. He's so out-of-place that his character seems like it was lifted from another movie and crammed into this one.

The only decent acting in the entire thing came from Hu. His is the only character I really feel any sympathy toward since he's so in over his head and he can't get out because he's stuck in between his conscience and his loyalty towards his brother, Kang. He wants to be a cool gangster like his brother, but he simply cannot bring himself to kill anyone. He's got such an optimistic view of the way things should be, he just doesn't understand the rules of the world he inhabits - from remembering good memories of his mother to returning to his brother in the end.

Overall, the movie takes too long to build up to pretty much nothing. There is no lesson learned, the hero doesn't get the girl, and the happy ending is just a dismal role of the credits. I would've even been happy with a sad ending if it managed to strike a chord like something out of The Godfather...
So yes, 5 out of 10 simply for aesthetics. Better luck next time.

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I ain't your friend, palooka.

I gave it an 8/10, but you have to remember that an 8 is a very high score on IMDb, which could put it in or close to the Top 250. It's unlikely for most films to end up with a score that high here. anything above, say, a 5.5 has a decent average for IMDb. Currently, Blood Brothers is just at that dividing line, which does seem a bit low for it to me, but I can understand many reasons that someone might not love the film. My score was lower near the start of the film, too. This was a rare film (relative to my typical reactions) that kept building momentum and getting more interesting as it went on.


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