Combining macabre humour with his iconoclastic style, Balabanov’s nihilistic 1997 gangster film looked to examine the strained dichotomy between Russia’s Soviet past and the parliamentary Republic of the present. The film’s protagonist Danila (Sergey Bodrov, Jr.), travels to St Petersburg after finishing his military service to visit his successful older brother. However, his brother turns out to be a hitman and pulls Danila into the city’s criminal underworld. Brother strived to shatter Russia's emerging global image by disguising high-art as throwaway genre fare, adopting the perspective of a principled assassin whose amorphous moral position successfully reflects the precarious state of a generation in stasis.