Dead Man's Bluff

Nizhny Novgorod in the mid 1990s. Two incompetent hitmen ruin every job their local boss gives them and cover each mistake with another killing. A case of heroin passes from hand to hand through the film, and nobody manages to deliver it. Aleksei Balabanov drops the seriousness of the Brat films here and plays the Russian nineties as black comedy: nobody is competent, everybody is armed, and violence has become routine. The jump at the end makes a plain suggestion about where the criminals of that decade ended up, and that is the real joke. Aleksei Panin and Dmitri Dyuzhev lead, with Nikita Mikhalkov as the local crime boss. It opened on 27 May 2005 in New York and the following day in Moscow. Its flaws: the violence is deliberately vulgar and excessive, some of the comedy is crude, and none of the characters develop. Without some knowledge of the Russian nineties the final implication is lost. Who it is for: viewers who like Russian cinema and black humour. Who it is not for: anyone with no appetite for bloody comedy.