Brotherhood

Plot synopsis:
Frank (Jon Foster) is an active member of fictional fraternity Sigma Zeta Chi, and hazes pledges for initiation by forcing them to believe they are going to rob convenience stores. Adam (Trevor Morgan) and Kevin (Lou Taylor Pucci) are pledges who go with Frank to rob the stores. Before they enter the store, another active brother gives them the money and reveals it was a break designed to test their bravery. However, due to confusion over which stores to stop pledges, Kevin is not stopped and actually tries to rob the store; Kevin is shot in the shoulder as a result. Frank finds out of the mix-up and attempts to stop Kevin but is too late. With Adam's help, he subdues the store clerk, Mike (Arlen Escarpeta), who is a high school friend of Adam. They return to the fraternity house and clear a party to take care of Kevin's wounds, but Frank orders Adam and Graham (Luke Sexton) to go back to the store, recover the security tape, and check on Mike. When returning to the store, they find that the security camera does not work, but Mike is reluctant to tell the police a lie to cover their tracks.
Scared by Mike's attitude, Adam and Graham kidnap him and take him back to the house. Frank refuses taking Kevin to the hospital, fearful that the police will learn about the night's actions, and instead calls Bean's (Jesse Steccato) medical professor to take care of Kevin. Adam tries to blackmail Mike by secretly recording an elicited confession, but Mike stops talking once he discovers the recorder. Kevin's sister Emily (Jennifer Sipes) appears and angrily threatens to call the police over an unrelated prank. As she leaves, she is involved in a car accident with Bean's professor, who suffers a concussion and is rendered unable to help Kevin. With time running out and Kevin losing blood, Frank orders Mike's torturing to ensure his cooperation. At the same time, Officer Jennings (Jeff Gibbs), who is a former member, discovers Kevin but decides to stay quiet. Adam becomes insistent in taking Kevin to the hospital and tells Frank he can get leverage on Mike after hearing money is missing from the store. Adam is able to get Mike to admit he stole the money, but Mike will only cooperate if they return the stolen money and clear his name. After a tense standoff with a nervous clerk, Adam and Frank succeed in returning the money, and Frank allows them to drop off Kevin in the hospital; they claim it is a hunting accident.
Frank says the night is a victory but Adam sees otherwise and decides to leave the fraternity, angry at their arrogance and callousness. After Adam punches Frank, the other members catch Adam and begin to beat him harshly, as Frank claims that their brotherhood and loyalty helped them get out of trouble. Another fraternity member, Jackson (Chad Halbrook), returns to the house and remembers that a pledge was locked into the trunk during the party; when they open the trunk, they discover the pledge has died from alcohol poisoning. Adam finally calls the police and tells them everything, which leads to the arrest of Frank and others.

Tags: prank

Review:
One doesn't need a PhD to predict negative consequences when some college frat boys pressurize a fraternity applicant to carry out a convenience store robbery as part of their induction process.
Needless to say, the hold-up is less than a complete success, and "Brotherhood" finds itself in similar territory to "Very Bad Things" as the fall-out from this reckless prank spirals disastrously out of control during the course of a long night.
As a depiction of the absurdity of fraternity life and the misguided "brotherhood" that often dominates the thinking of fraternity members, this film paints a grim picture of the multiple ways that hazing can go wrong.
What begins as an absolutely ridiculous prank leads to an unlikely series of poor judgments and unfortunate events—arrogance and racism seem to be the principles that guide the fraternity members' sense of "brotherhood." One of the brothers (whose name I couldn't tell you, since the characters are all so flat and indistinct) actually has a sense of morality and fights his peers in an effort to do the right thing, but he is—of course—over-ruled.
The film "Brotherhood" is actually a litmus test for your ability to connect with today's college experience.
If you are in touch with today's typical college fraternity/sorority lifestyle, you will likely think this film is excellent.
Originally I rated this film 8 out of ten, but I changed it to 9 out of 10, simply because of the performances given by this film's rising stars, but I will get into that later.If you consider yourself "middle of the road" when it comes to understanding college social scenes, see how you feel about this movie - it may help you decide how well you understand college life today, if you were asked this same question.From what I can tell, the story is indeed fictional but based on real experiences and 'folk lore' or 'urban legends' of college life.
If you see this film on the big screen, you will see Pucci dominate Morgan in scenes that the two are in (from a purely acting perspective).
Once again, I think Trevor Morgan had a tough job in this film, thus making it more difficult to perform with a short shooting cycle.
You might see a few things coming or not, but the fact, that the movie does set a mood and never steers away from it, is good thing in my book.Of course you could argue, that the characters are not really likable and there might not be someone in here with whom you can identify.
It popped up on Netflix one night, and grabbed my attention because it was a "frat movie." I'm not in the Greek system myself, but I have many good friends who are, so the subject is of interest to me (also because they are so often misrepresented in the media, but that's a discussion for another day).
I prepared myself for another overblown party movie, and ended up being served something completely different and far more impressive.What I ended up watching (instead of a fluff-piece on partying and sex) was a gripping, well-paced, superbly-acted and well-executed drama.
Brotherhood is about more than "frat boys": it is about human motivation and decision making, it is about loyalty, and it shows how just one simple turn of events can change everything you had ever planned or expected.I know the plot description for this sounds cliché and awful.
It's troubling to see this movie get so high of a rating, and to think that it won an award at a legitimate film festival truly blows my mind.
If you find yourself in a similar situation to me, randomly tuning into this movie at 3 AM, do yourself a favor and turn the TV off immediately, those two hours of sleep are infinitely more valuable than this piece of trash film..
I was in a fraternity in college, so I enjoy watching movies about Greek life.
The acting from the unknown cast is excellent was well- Jon Foster is especially good as the head of the fraternity.And the twist at the end of the film was a great touch.
The nice thing about the twist is that it's not easy to predict, but also did not feel forced.I wouldn't necessarily call this a movie about Greek life, but it's a terrific indie drama/thriller set in the world of fraternities..
If you enjoy watching the most unbelievably idiotic people, storyline, and sequence of events this movie is for you.
Viewed at the Festival de Cannes 2010The fraternity (and sorority) system is something very peculiar to US colleges, but thanks to films such as Animal House people in other countries now have a very good idea how things work: all beer, parties and panty raids right?
Because Brotherhood takes the concept of initiation rites and works it into a very taut thriller about power and abuse and how far would you be willing to go to protect your fellows as opposed to doing the right thing.Not wishing to give anything away (I don't write spoilers, even intentionally), what starts out as a prank, robbing a convenience store, spirals out of control as every attempt to put right the wrong just makes things worse.
A surprisingly good movie about a frat initiation that goes bad, and just keeps getting worse and worse.
After a initiation prank goes wrong and a pledge gets shot they are worried that he will end up in jail.
your average Hollywood movie is mostly unbelievable, these guys were young at time stupid and way out of their depth, and nothing goes as planned.
The film is about fraternity ideas gone all wrong, and the following bad choices made.
There's a shootout, and much more I'm not willing to say.Directed by Will Canon, the film sets up an interesting premise, and quite effective acting by the youngsters, though the whole are put to some kind of extreme, it's interesting and exciting to watch.
Of course it's far fetched, and there's so many insane decisions, but still it makes out an interesting premise, when bad leadership and idiots mix up.It's a film high on tension and action, and there's a nest fun coming up all the time.
When a fraternity decides to play a prank on several of their pledges, something goes wrong, leading to a chaotic night, but can they work together to fix their problems, or will they just make it worse?
It's a short film that cuts through the bull and gets right to it's point, that part was a real change of pace, but personally I could have done without unbelievable Hollywood element that was added to it in certain places.
The movie begins with one prank, which goes way off.
Do watch it , it's a good movie..
They decide to rob a convenient store but end up entered in the wrong store and it's all downhill from here for this guys who'll try to do anything to not go to jail and save a wounded friend (Lou Taylor Pucci in the best performance of a wounded guy that I ever seen) shot by the guy behind the counter.Jon Foster and Trevor Morgan play the main characters in the film, and the ones who clash against each other to decide what's best for them while trying to get out of this situation; one is very heated about everything, and the other is a little bit naive but with some smartness when needed.
A robbery, the kidnapped cashier, a car accident, angered girls, and of course the wounded fella, and the police, who might show up at any time in the fraternity house are the major problems by this group who simply wanted to make a prank and join new members.Fast and with thrills here and there, "Brotherhood" is an okay film, very easy to follow but with some accidents here and there that might become annoying if you're clever enough to find solutions where the writers and the characters didn't found.
The whole part of returning the money was bad, very annoying and the way turned out the story (for this characters) could've ended worse than they thought.
The whole battle between Foster and Morgan as the strong guy versus the weak and intelligent guy was very clever, a cliché that was well developed and it works.Since being in a college here is a different experience than it is in the U.S. this film will pass unnoticed here.
By that I mean that this whole fraternity thing doesn't exist (and if it does it is more invisible than anything), people go to college and keep locked up in their own little worlds, keeping a distance from everything, and throwing their intelligence to others like vanity or an excuse to be pretentious kinds, they don't care about real friendship and things like that.
If you need to escape from things, just for a hour and half yet have some ethical thoughts, figure out what would you do in a situation like the one presented in "Brotherhood" go see this film right away.
When a character in the film has been shot, and is taken to somebody's student accommodation so as to be treated, one of the tenants demands an onlooker heavily involved in the situation urgently do something – demands he rapidly rejects out of not wanting to look small; inferior, nor as if he takes orders, whilst in front of a handful of first-year kids he desires to look authoritarian in front of.
Here is a film with a fair number of robbery sequences; characters charging around an intimate urban locale wielding guns as well as young men verbally clashing with one another over heated issues - and yet in spite of this, is actually about something: neither manifesting into an exploitative crime film nor descending into the doldrums of being a lecturous chore.The film follows that of Adam, a fresher (or freshman in the set-world of America) played by Trevor Morgan, whose on the cusp of starting at a university and must undergo an immediate process in these, the dying embers of summer before the academic year begins, that'll see him inducted into the realms of a domestic fraternity.
But it is a sham, and where the frat-leader Frank's (Foster) excessive use of profanity in both questioning and challenging that of the other's masculinity has us question the competence of the screenwriter/director in their ability to broaden dialogue, we are swiftly put in our place thereafter when it's revealed the whole thing is a scare mongering act for the others yet to 'rob' somewhere.Disaster strikes when one of the fraternity hopefuls does indeed hold up a store, when the collecting of a bag of money from an insider already there is what should have happened.
In waiting outside the incorrect store, a fraternity member dooms Kevin (Taylor-Pucci) to being the hapless kid shot by a clerk, an event which kicks off all manner of strife for those involved and causes some serious headaches for these people early on in their scholarly life before term has even begun.
In the panic, Kevin is taken the a proverbial fraternity headquarters; the large party unfolding cut short when a spiteful, narcissistic, evil individual suddenly finds himself hosting a GSW victim after having previously been limited to meticulously organising ill-judged pranks on that of people not wanting to drink the amounts of alcohol forced upon them and not wanting to have an act of sex go wrong which has been wholly planned to.In feeding off an approach to its thesis more broadly reminiscent of Scorsese's After Hours or a vastly underrated crime thriller from a few years ago in the form of Running Scared, the film plunges its characters into a causality driven Hell where the rejection of proper authorities as well as professional medical attention forces those involved through a series of bleak night-set altercations and interactions, all the while our anchor in Adam gluing proceedings as this first-year kid daring to challenging the patriarchy.
Canon does a great job in moving things along, allowing the bluntness of the opening sequences on how the fraternity operate dissolve into this unglamorous procession of lies and amorality wholly brought about by their own egomaniacal agenda; using the item of the individual bleeding to death as a wonderful device to keep tensions and deadlines heightened.In feeding off the above approaches, the piece harks back to an era of twenty-or-so years ago when films such as Reservoir Dogs dominated the independent crime scene.
Unfortunately for Kevin and his peers a set of circumstances end up with Kevin being seriously injured and the rest of the group facing serious problems An independent thriller and one that often hits the target - until you stop to think about things of course .
But I guess that's the same thing with a massive number of films where the audience aren't supposed to examine the unseen events leading up to the opening scene of a movie .
It also seems a bit extreme for armed robbery to part of frat high jinx but very quickly before the opening credits appear this is explained as being a prank from then on we've got a RESERVOIR DOGS type of story with a wounded man and his friends wondering how they're going to escape from their self inflicted predicament Thankfully the audience are spared any type of Tarantino post modernist homage and the narrative is full of tense moments but BROTHERHOOD isn't entirely successful due to contrived storytelling .
For example it just happens to be revealed that someone recognises the counter assistant in the robbed store and the rest of the film continues in the same way .
So, with limited preparation (I had no idea what the film was about) I set about this American fraternity thriller.
It quickly transpires that the initiation ceremony is a fake and, before each individual gets to the door of their respective stores, they are stopped by a fellow frat man who gives them the cash they have been instructed to rob, to make it look as if they have been successful.
The pledges are told they must commit a convenience store robbery to become members, but that by doing so does not grant them the opportunity in the fraternity.
I have been shot before, right in the bladder, so I can presume to appreciate the importance of quick medical attention.The idea for the movie was alright, I just wish the frat guys had some common sense, I honestly don't understand how they are even in college, or how they made it out of high school.
I must say it was funny to watch how things unfolded, but I kept reading my book and turning away from my laptop because it is just one ludicrous decision after another, over and over.The movie has to be a joke to my intelligence because this is nowhere near good, nowhere near worthwhile.
Although depressing, I quite like films like this where one action taken leads to a downward spiral of doom as a situation continues to get worse - ala Very Bad Things or Before The Devil Knows You're Dead.Brotherhood is in the same vein as the aforementioned films (though not as harsh) as we follow the exploits of a group of frat house students and pledges who's night takes a turn for the worse when a convenience store hold up prank goes wrong.The story unfolds and the viewer watches as the characters continue to make bad decisions, digging a deeper hole for the situation they are in.
If done right, this type of film can take you on a ride where you feel involved as you think to yourself 'but I'd do that', 'If only they'd done....'.
Plausability always plays a big part and although some of the decisions made by Adam and the others are just plain stupid, it plays out well without going silly.There were some believable performances and good acting all round.
If you enjoy clever fast-paced films which showcase characters who are not overly developed, which have an excellent script and you are allured by an uncomplicated plot line, then this is an ideal movie for you to watch.The movie commences with a group of young men being driven around in the back a red van, most of whom look petrified.
One of the characters states, "Alright like I said before I wouldn't ask you pussies to do anything I wouldn't do first." The audience is then drawn into the film, wondering who these people are and what they are doing.
The plan, however, falls apart when one of the pledges actually goes through with pointing a gun at the shop assistant, Mike, and gets shot.The movie is clever and it kept me intrigued.
As the movie went on, my attention was captivated because I truly wanted to know what was going to happen.
For example, at the end of the movie, we find out what happens to the boy that who was left locked in the car during the party scene at the frat house.
Not to mention, if someone decides to take their friend to the hospital they can get in a lot of trouble, and that comes up all the time, fraternity or not.Yes, most of the situations that came up in the movie were completely ridiculous and you would have to be stupid to actually allow them in your chapter.
Just a few years ago, a local fraternity got kicked off campus, disbanded, and people involved arrested because a pledge drank too much and passed out.
To sum it up, a lot of people will see this as just an OK thriller, but I think the last scene adds a lot of worth to this film.
A few random things though: The pledges, and some of the members, looked way too old, although they did a decent job of looking like they had no idea what was going on.