Blood Brothers

“Blood Brothers,” the 81-minute iQIYI quickie that dropped on 5 October , is exactly the kind of urban-migrant morality play the algorithm orders when it smells a holiday weekend and a social-media hashtag. Liu Lang, our wronged-gaokao hero, is sketched with the same thick Sharpie the film uses for everything else: one minute he’s tearing up an exam permit in the world’s least convincing slow-motion, the next he’s on a south-bound bus that looks suspiciously like a green-screen stock shot. The script, credited to three writers who apparently met for one coffee, ticks every box on the provincial-film-board checklist—scam montage (check), found-family banter (check), crackdown-on-evil voice-over (double check)—yet never musters a single image you couldn’t swap into any other micro-budget streaming title without noticing. When the plot remembers it needs stakes, it wheel-spins into a karaoke-bar human-trafficking ring so generically lit it could be a cancelled K-drama subplot. Our three lads improvise stake-outs by holding phones the wrong way round and whispering “copy that” like they learnt espionage from a 2002 Nokia ad. The big rescue sequence is a shaky-cam dash through a parking garage that ends when the villain simply trips over a traffic cone—an accidental metaphor for a climax that has nowhere to go. Meanwhile, the dialogue keeps congratulating itself on being “realistic,” which here means every other line is either “We gotta eat, bro” or “This city eats people!” delivered with the energy of a dubstep ringtone at 3 %. Still, you could do worse for a free-with-membership 81 minutes; you could also do better by re-watching an old episode of “Ode to Joy.” The film’s parting shot—Liu Lang staring at yet another recruitment banner—wants to feel cyclical and profound, but lands closer to “we ran out of money, so let’s just freeze-frame on the same prop.” In the end, “Blood Brothers” is the cinematic equivalent of instant noodles: fills the gap, tastes fine, and is forgotten before the bowl hits the bin.