Big Brother Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Big Brother Blu-ray Movie Review

Goodbye, Mr. Chan?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 20, 2019

Do you have a favorite film featuring a put upon teacher attempting to mentor sometimes (often?) out of control students? My personal favorite in this subgenre would probably be 1967’s Up the Down Staircase, for a couple of admittedly odd and probably tangential reasons. I love Fred Karlin’s kind of sweetly melancholic score, but the film was also based on a best selling book by an author with a memorable surname (even if she needs to go back to school to learn how to spell it — and, yes, that’s a joke). A close runner up in my personal pantheon would probably be the much derided 1969 musical remake of Goodbye, Mr. Chips, which I’ve always had kind of a soft spot for courtesy of its wonderful performances and even for its frequently lambasted score (not to mention the sumptuous orchestrations of John Williams). (Enterprising Googlers can find an old review of the DVD release of Goodbye, Mr. Chips I wrote for another site many years ago, but I mention my frankly unapologetic appreciation of scenarist-composer-lyricist Leslie Bricusse in this site’s Scrooge Blu-ray review.) There are any number of other films that various film lovers might want to include on this particular list, including such widely variant entries as Blackboard Jungle, Stand and Deliver, 1967’s “other” film about a teacher To Sir, With Love , Dead Poets Society, Lean on Me, and The History Boys, to name but a very few. Into this cinematic “classroom” comes Big Brother, a fitfully engaging film which posits Donnie Yen as a teacher carrying around some significant emotional baggage who attempts to bring order to an unruly group of students in an urban Hong Kong high school. The fact that this is a Donnie Yen picture may indicate that this particular teacher has a few butt kicking proclivities he needs to rely on, a kind of odd element in a film that otherwise attempts to hew fairly closely to some of the standard plot tropes that this subgenre often offers.

A character whose name is transliterated variously as Chan or Chen (Donnie Yen) shows up at an urban school, applying for a teaching position. He’s initially refused, since he has no real teaching experience, but he thrusts a reference letter under his interviewer’s nose which seems to have considerable impact, and he’s pretty much hired on the spot, with the warning that his soon to be charges are on the delinquent side of things. His first interactions with them prove that quite capably, though Chan is also a guy who evidently knows a lot about just about everything, dispensing advice in quick order on everything from cellphone radiation to videogame updates. His omniscience fails pretty spectacularly to impress anyone (at least in the beginning, of course), but when he resorts to setting off his room’s fire sprinkler, he at least gets their attention.

I’m frankly not even going to get into some of the subplots involving the students in this film, since those are in some ways the most rote aspects of Big Brother. Suffice it to say the film has what might be called a “bleeding heart” approach to its underprivileged students, documenting roiling home lives and other dysfunctions (some self inflicted, it should be added), while always offering Chan as the (mostly) calm and collected mentor helping them to sort everything out. Other aspects of the plot, while admittedly less derivative, seem like a rather odd fit in this general template, with both corporate intrigue and even mixed martial arts fighting entering the fray (literally and figuratively). The story may strike some (no pun intended) as trying way too hard to work in a few fleeting combat elements, as if to try to wrangle some of Yen's traditional fan base. It’s a rather uneven mishmash at times, but the film has a surprising amount of heart which may help it to elide some of its triter aspects for some viewers.

Big Brother Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Big Brother is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. The IMDb lists Arri Alexa Minis as having been utilized, with a 2K DI. Aside from a few passing instances of noise in some low light scenes, this is a very pleasing looking presentation, one with typically excellent detail levels extending even to some midrange and wide range shots. The film is rather colorful, as can perhaps be gleaned from some of the screenshots accompanying this review, and some of the greens and teals in particular resonate quite strongly. Some low light moments, while not particularly noisy looking, do suffer from lackluster shadow detail and fine detail levels. Some interstitial scenes, including some flashbacks, have been tweaked to more closely resemble "traditional" film, and some sequences have either been graded toward sepia or desaturated to almost black and white levels, but clarity and overall detail tend to be very good throughout these changes.

Big Brother Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Big Brother features a rather boisterous DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix in Cantonese. The film is stuffed to its gills with source cues, and those tend to spill quite invitingly into the surround channels, but there are a number of standout sequences here, including a go cart scene, where there are some really fun panning effects and good bursts of LFE. Of course the relatively minimal fight scenes also offer some good bone crunching effects as well. Dialogue is rendered without any issues at all, and the track boasts impressive dynamic range and fluid fidelity.

Big Brother Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer A (1080p; 1:47)


• Trailer B (1080p; 1:25)


• U.S. Trailer (1080p; 1:01) may be interesting to some fans in how it both markets the film (more as an action adventure entry) and how it pretty prominently features some of the English language snippets within the film.

As is usually the case with Well Go USA Blu-ray releases, the supplements have been authored to follow one another automatically. After the above supplements play, the disc then moves automatically on to trailers for other Well Go USA releases. Those trailers for other Well Go USA releases also play automatically at disc boot up.

Big Brother Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Is Big Brother on the hokey side? Absolutely, and in fact that's one of the things I kind of dug about it. It wears its heart on its sleeve, and while many aspects of its plot are downright cliché ridden, they're also handled with a fair degree of finesse here, making the film an easy watch that has a few brief bursts of adrenaline pumping action for those who see the name Donnie Yen and can't think of anything other than adrenaline pumping action. Technical merits are solid for those considering a purchase.