Just another regular blood-soaked, gangster-shooting day in 1940s Shanghai...
The Duel of the Brothers is a 2018 action movie set in the 1940s criminal underworld in Shanghai, the city of vice and center of triad activities. True to all movies with this setting, of this particular genre, the movie touches themes of loyalty, brotherhood, rising in power in the triads, and the inevitable downfall that comes after reaching the top.
Lin Ho-tian is an elite assassin, a Professional Killer, but also a Hitman with a Heart, trying to make a living in 1940s Shanghai. During a hit assignment, Ho-tian discovers his estranged younger brother, Wan Jia-hao, who was sold to a crime family while a kid, is actually still alive, and is intending to take over the Shanghai underworld and rule with an iron fist. When killers coming after Jia-hao crosses path with Ho-tian, Ho-tian will have to convince Jia-hao of their past brotherhood and try to save his brother from going down a further path of self-destruction.
See also Blood Brothers (2007) and The Game Changer for films with similar themes, settings, and action scenes.
The Duel of the Brothers contains examples of:
- Accidental Aiming Skills: While a recovering Ho-tian is setting up glass bottles for him to practice shooting skills, Angie, who is polishing his gun, accidentally pulls the trigger and fires a round remaining in the chamber, hitting a bottle dead center.
- Artistic License – Gun Safety: The above scene where Angie is polishing Ho-tian's pistol. Why would she even think that was a good idea? Even if the gun isn't loaded (it IS) she might end up damaging it, which would badly screw over Ho-tian when he inevitably needs that pistol to use in shootouts. Of course, that's not going into details on why would a trained professional assassin allow a woman he knew for barely a month touch his pistol in the first place.
- Badass in a Nice Suit: Both the brothers Ho-tian and Jia-hao are often seen in slick black or white suits.
- Blasting It Out of Their Hands: In the final standoff scene, Ho-tian shoots Jia-hao's pistol out of his hands just as he's pointing his gun on Angie in a rage.
- Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress: On Angie, after she gets shot through the stomach in the final scene.
- Body Double: Ho-tian managed to assasinate Boss Hung in the second act... except he didn't. That is a decoy he sniped, deliberately set up by Boss Hung to lure him into a trap.
- Cold Sniper: Hao-tian and his partner / fellow assassin, Dark Action Girl Shen-miao. Especially the latter; after Ho-tian had assasinated a mob boss in his introduction scene but is unable to shoot the boss' family, Shen-miao took over and snipes the boss' wife and young son immediately. When he confronts her about shooting a woman and a child in the next scene, she simply replies with the typical "It's just business" respond.
- Flashback B-Plot: More often than not, Ho-tian and Jiao-hao will have flashbacks to their pasts when they are kids, promising to look out for each other, before the scene cuts back to the present where they were adults. Notably the last scene of the two brothers together: Ho-tian holding on Jia-hao's corpse and telling him not to die, while intersect with a Match Cut depicting a flashback of Ho-tian (as a child) holding a feverish, seriously ill Jia-hao (ditto) telling his younger brother to wake up.
- Friend to All Children: Ho-tian, who frequently hangs out with a group of street urchins, giving them food and often bonding with those kids who considers him as a Cool Uncle. Justified, since Ho-tian grew up in the back alleys as a street urchin.
- Long-Lost Relative: Ho-tian and Jia-hao, respectively a triad assassin and a mob boss, who turns out to be brothers by blood, until Jia-hao as a child was sold to a triad family.
- Heroic Bloodshed: Two brothers growing up in a triad underworld, who ends up on different sides, inevitably becoming enemies despite realizing they are brothers, where their loyalty to their organization and each other will be put to the test. Sounds like something John Woo would make.
- Heroic RRoD: Ho-tian suffers a really nasty one at the third act, after realizing his long-lost brother, Jia-hao, no longer considers him as family, telling straight to his face that the brother he knew as a child was dead, before smashing a glass vase on Ho-tian's head.
- Hitman with a Heart: Lin Ho-tian, a hitman who refuse to perform hits if women and children are involved. Unfortunately, his fellow assassin Shen-miao disagrees with his actions.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: Ho-tian displays his accuracy with a pistol by running and shooting at the same time, at glass bottle targets from more than twenty meters away, including a Leap and Fire. And hits EVERY bottle without missing a single shot.
- Non-Indicative Title: Despite the title, at the end of the movie the brothers Ho-tian and Jia-hao didn't get to fight to shoot each other, since Jia-hao dies before he can acknowledge Ho-tian as a brother.
- Pretty Little Headshots: Happens throughout the movie: The rival mob boss assasinated by Ho-tian in the opening scene, a few mooks in the nightclub shootout, another triad boss Ho-tian shoots through the temple, a few mobsters sniped by Shen-miao, among others.
- Stoic Spectacles: On Ho-tian in the final scene, when he's disguised as a musician to blend into Jia-hao and Angie's wedding ceremony.
- Skyward Scream: Ho-tian at the end of the movie does this while holding his estranged brother Jia-hao's corpse, shot on his wedding day.
- A Taste of the Lash: Jia-hao suffers a flogging and beating after getting arrested by a police superintedant for being a suspect of the nightclub assasination scene.
- That Man Is Dead: A variation. When the long-lost brothers Ho-tian and Jia-Hao confronts each other face-to-face, Jia-hao said to Ho-tian's face "his brother is dead".Jia-hao (to Ho-tian, after the revelation of their relation as brothers): "I have never looked for you all these years! Do you want to know why? Because, to me... my brother is dead! I DO NOT HAVE A BROTHER!"
- We Have to Get the Bullet Out!: After Ho-tian gets a stray round into his shoulder during the nightclub shootout scene, Jia-hao had to deliver him back to his mansion, where his lover Angie assist Ho-tian to remove the bullet. It's one of the most graphic depiction of a bullet removal ever put in a film, which should invoke plenty of squick.
