The picture aims for “Once Upon a Time in America” and “The Godfather”poignancy, but it ends as a derivative recycling of gangster movie conventions and cliches.

The story centers around three childhood friends (played by Daniel Wu, Tony Yang and Ye Liu ) who leave their country ways behind them to try to make it in the big city. Of course, they give in to temptation, fall in with the wrong crowd and lose their moral bearing.

Eventually they arrive at a violent, bloody moment of reconciliation and redemption, assisted by the usual suspects, including a tough mafioso type (Sun Honglei), his moll (Shu Qi) and a mysterious, trenchcoat-wearing hitman (Chang Chen) with ulterior motives. Only Chang manages to add any depth to his stereotypical character.

True to epic form, “Blood Brothers” unfolds in glorious wide screen, but Tan does little with format. The director insists on keeping shots tight and close. This is a story told almost exclusively from the shoulder up, creating static and lifeless scenes. More than once, Tan fails to set up a scene or film it to full advantage. The numerous gunfights, for instance, show no sense of kinetic movement or of one character’s spatial relationship to another. Often, it seems like gunmen are shooting at nothing at all.

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