Some of the commenters at IMDB claim that Brother-2 got bad reviews from Americans because it is anti-American and shows lots of Americans getting killed by the Russian guy.

Nonsense. Hollywood has produced a steady diet of anti-American movies for as long as I can remember. And lots of those I see in the previews at movie houses show Americans being gunned down all over the place.

In fact, that’s the problem with Brat-2. It’s too much like an American movie. It also has the same shallow moralizing about materialism that you can get in any number of American films.

For a movie that makes an attempt to come to grips with the poisonous nature of materialism, watch the original Brat. That movie shows you, instead of just giving you meaningless talk. In that movie, Sveta makes difficult choices throughout. So does the German.

In Brat you are given reasons to care about the people who are caught up in the greed and violence. Not so in Brat-2. There isn’t even anything about “brother” in the sequel, even though the two characters are both present. In Brat-2 there is no brother relationship. In the original there was.

The film does have some redeeming value. Just as in Brat and Gruz 200, Alexsei Balabanov has quite an eye for filming grimy urban street scenes, as in the clip above.