BROTHERHOOD review

Brotherhood probably looked amazing on paper. You can imagine director Will Canon convinced he'd got an absolute live wire of a script, an escalating black comedy of errors where you're never quite sure what's going to happen next. For much of the first act it seems anything but, weighted down by a tired script, performances that rank as mediocre at best and pacing that suggests someone was drunk in charge of the final cut - but the basic strength of the premise proves surprisingly resilient, and while the finished film could have done with a lot more work it's still not without its charms.

The first few minutes suggest it could be that live wire. A group of freshmen desperate to join a particular college fraternity psych themselves up to charge into convenience stores one at a time, mask on, gun out. Only something goes wrong - as if you couldn't guess - sparking off one catastrophe after another as the protagonists try and cover things up. It's a cheap and cheerful little set piece but still pacy, energetic and possessed of unexpected depth, setting out character dynamics with a fair amount of playful reserve (who the instigator is, who his confidantes are and so on).

But it slowly starts looking a lot more cheap and a lot less cheerful. The sight of the title after the opening's already dragged on for far too long is the first indication someone behind the scenes wasn't really sure what they were doing, and the house party directly after that (where the frat boys return to deal with the fallout) only reinforces that impression. Loud, artless and tacky, and not in a good way, it's like a pastiche of every smutty teen drama from the past few years, as if the Zucker brothers decided to try and make a real film.

This feels like the biggest problem, as if Canon had a fairly solid idea of what goes into one of those movies where events progress from bad to worse, but little grasp of how exactly a director makes these things worth watching. Admittedly the running time does him few favours, but still the leads are a litany of clichés - the ringleader teetering on the edge of a breakdown, the nice guy who knows he should be calling the police but can't bring himself to cut his ties to the fraternity, the party animal - none of whom get painted in anything more than very broad strokes.

The dialogue feels forced, and none of the cast are up to giving it any real weight. Whatever the intended results it feels as if there's a sex scene with an overweight girl because dude, of course there has to be; ditto the torture scene where several of the protagonists discover their inner racist, and the angry sorority girls. The ringleader never feels like a genuine threat as such, and you're left wondering why the nice guy (ostensibly the hero) doesn't just give him a swift right hook to the jaw.

The odd thing is, once you start treating everyone as equally pathetic, in many respects Brotherhood starts to make a good deal more sense. The underlying chain of cause and effect is not a little ridiculous, and pretty contrived, but it's still reasonably solid showboating. There's a definite voyeuristic thrill in seeing what's going to go wrong next. Although ridiculous, forced or otherwise Brotherhood is surprisingly restrained in some ways, and never suggests Canon is putting his characters through the wringer merely to hear them scream, unlike the seedy, brutish worldview of a film like Kidnapped.

There's genuine tension, especially in the third act, as if the director's basically hit on something he can't help but get something good out of. The ending, too, is refreshingly free from pat morality lessons (no-one comes out looking like a saint). Canon even manages to throw in a pleasing, if simplistic epilogue which - given all the easy broisms he's resorted to by that point - is much darker and more nuanced than anyone might have expected.

Brotherhood is a hard film to cheer on, because it's by no means particularly great, or even good. It's amateurish, tonally wildly uneven and trying far too hard. At the same time that effort does arguably pay off - though technically it's not that far above average, there's depth it manages a lot more staying power and stands up to repeat viewing better than many far more polished productions. For those who want something a little more cerebral (just a little) for Friday night viewing, it comes cautiously recommended.