Donnie Yen is one of my favorite actors, and he’s typically seen starring in martial arts movies like the Ip Man series, Special ID, and many others. On May 21st, his latest release from Well Go USA arrives in Blu-ray + DVD format. In Big Brother, Yen plays Henry Chan, former US Marine who has moved back home to Hong Kong to take a teaching job at an at-risk high school. Accepting low pay, long hours, and a class full of kids who aren’t invested in their future, Chan takes the job with the intention of turning the likely fate of these kids around.
What plays out over the course of the next hour and a half is a sometimes cheesy, sometimes tear-jerking, but always worth-watching film that sees Chan get involved in five students’ lives. The focus of the movie is how he changes these five kids’ lives, but it’s evident that his efforts touch not only their lives, but also their families lives. Furthermore, he also motivates the school staff around him to do better. One of the subplots is that the school is close to being shutdown by the bureau of education, who are displeased with the standardized test results the students from this school are achieving. By studying these fives students via a questionnaire, and genuinely being interested in their development and well being, Chans sees that each of them has struggles in their family life that has led them to being distracted and content with educational failure.
Most of their issues involve parents that are either not present or ones that are physically there, but abusive, or borderline abusive.
Two of the five students are brothers, and their dad became an alcoholic when his wife cheated and left on him. To escape, one of the two constantly dilutes himself in videogames while the other tries to actually study, but can’t focus. Another student has a father that respects her younger brother much more than her, simply because she’s a girl. In another family, the student lives with this grandmother as his parents died, but he’s gotten himself mixed up in a local criminal ring as of late.
In every situation, Chan speaks life into their circumstance and helps bring about change. After meeting with the alcoholic, the man enters a support group. Upon getting involved in an altercation with the criminal organization the other student is getting tied into, the boy realizes that he doesn’t have to live this way to support himself and his grandmother, and decides he wants to become a teacher, too. There are some other neat plot elements that further expose backstories of the characters, most interestingly Chan himself, but to mention those would spoil some of the best elements of the movie.
The film doesn’t leave a lot of room for surprises and it is what it is (a feel-good movie), but that’s not to speak against it per se — just check your cynicism at the door and be ready to go with the flow of things going right, overall (there are some dark tones at times, but the outcome is positive).
A significant surprise on the technical front is that the only audio tracks included are Cantonese 5.1 and Stereo. Subtitles for English are included, but curiously no English audio track. That said, there was more spoken English in this movie than there is typically for a film out of Asia. Image quality is a bright, crisp, quality 1080p with little to no CG. Three trailers for the movie are included, two for the Asian market and one for the US market. No other extra features are on the disc.
Fans of Donnie Yen or those looking for a pretty good feel good movie with a few action scenes of Donnie should give Big Brother a chance. The Blu-ray + DVD release is somewhat mixed, though. No English audio track could be a major hurdle for some viewers and no extra features other than trailers is a letdown as well. Still, while this movie won’t win any awards or yield much replay value, it does have a lot of heart and a great message.
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