Dead Man's Bluff ( 2005 )

Who Says Crime Doesn´t Pay?

A Molotov cocktail of gruesome carnage, eccentric characters, and off-beat humor, Dead Man´s Bluff casts a bracingly cynical eye on recent Eastern European history. Director Aleksei Balabanov (Brother) uses "uniformly ace" (Variety) cameo performances, by Russia´s most prominent actors, to send up both the greed-is-good mentality of the newly democratized former Soviet Union and the self-conscious Tarantino/Guy Ritchie-style crime films of the 90´s. This ferocious farce suggests that on the mean free-market streets of modern day Russia, the only real liberty is the freedom to kill.

Trigger-happy sibling assassins Simon (Dmitri Dyuzhev) and Sergei (Aleksei Panin) work as errand boys for Mikhailovich (Nikita Mikhalkov - Oscar winning director of Burnt by the Sun), the sadistic kingpin of a provincial Russian town. But after brains Sergei and brawn Simon bungle a crucial drug deal, and a crooked cop´s death squad grabs their briefcase of "hell powder" heroin, Mikhailovich´s patience wears thin. The brother´s life and death quest to reclaim their stash initiates a messy turf war of beatings, torture and close-quarter gun-play. But as the bodies pile up, Simon and Sergei discover that in the circus-mirror world of capitalist New Russia, cops, gangsters, lawbreakers, and lawmakers can be interchangeable.

Packed with gratuitous violence, un-PC humor, and irreverent insight, and set to a home grown punk-metal score, Dead Man´s Bluff gleefully tears into the corrupt underbelly of Russian society. In so doing, it attains the grisly heights of stylized brutality and the vividly high-octane story-telling verve usually only seen in contemporary Asian action cinema.

Upplagd i sortimentet: 13 November, 2006