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Singleton's "Four Brothers" is more
"Shaft" than "Boyz in the
Hood". There's a little grit here and there,
but nothing to make you sit on the edge of your
seat wondering if it'll all end okay -- the answer
is, it will. Well, mostly. "Four
Brothers" does just enough to make you crack
a smile, but never enough to convince you it's
anything particularly special, which may be its
downfall if you came in expecting more. On a
slightly more curious note, the film will make you
realize just how stiff and uncoordinated Mark
Wahlberg is when he's required to play anything
other than a temperamental street tough, because
Wahlberg is entirely at home here as the black
sheep brother Bobby.
"Four Brothers"
stars Wahlberg as Bobby Mercer, a hothead who has
return to his hometown of
Detroit
after his adopted mother is killed in a
convenience store robbery. Bobby has three
brothers, Angel (Tyrese Gibson) and Jeremiah
(Andre Benjamin), both black, and Jack (Garret
Hedlund), who is white. The foursome are adopted
brothers whose childhood disposition was so
hopeless that their foster mother decided to take
it upon herself to raise them as her own. Now
grown up, the brothers return to their homestead,
where Jeremiah has become a successful businessman
with a family and Jack is still a hopeless garage
musician. Bobby, meanwhile, has done stints in
prison, while Angel has just been discharged from
the Marines.
At first the brothers are
content to get reacquainted with each other and
their new life without their mother, until
evidence pointing to their mother's death as a
set-up, part of a larger conspiracy, comes their
way. Further investigation involving a highly
useful canister of gasoline, some handguns and
shotguns, and two basketball courts start to
reveal a deadly conspiracy that may or may not
implicate one of the brothers. The boys are
determined to find out who is the mastermind
behind their mother's death, even if they have to
shoot every dog, gangbanger, and bar in
Detroit
to do it. Which, if you were wondering, they do.
I must admit that "Four
Brothers" caught me by surprise by being much
more entertaining than I thought it would be.
There's a breezy, devil-may-care quality about it
that you either dig or you don't. Director John
Singleton has put on the same hat that got him
through "2
Fast 2 Furious" for "Four
Brothers", whereby little makes sense and
it's mostly style over substance. For instance,
early in the film Bobby interrupts a High School
basketball game, punches out a student and whips
out his handgun at the crowd. At this point you
would expect the kids in the benches to clear out
in a panic. Not so. Instead, the kids jeer Bobby
for interrupting their game.
"Four Brothers"
seems determined to make up for its shortcomings
with crazy action set pieces, which may surprise
many viewers because of the film's trailers and
advertising approach. If you just went by the
trailers, you wouldn't expect to see an insane car
chase on slick, icy roads at night, a point-blank
execution by the brothers that leaves young Jack
in momentary shock, and a shootout outside the
Mercer house that stacks the bodies high in the
snowy streets. It's unfortunate that "Four
Brothers" was lost in the box office shuffle,
as it's certainly deserving of more attention. Not
because it's a movie of any high quality, but
because it does what it does very well, and that
in itself is a major accomplishment in a
Hollywood
movie.
Again, Mark Wahlberg is
really good here. Maybe Wahlberg knows what it's
like to walk with a swagger and throw a punch when
he should be considering his options, especially
in light of all the things I've heard said of the
man. In any case, the interplay between the four
brothers makes up the highlight of the film,
especially Bobby's relentless torment of Jack via
the younger brother's less than manly lifestyle.
Although all four actors do good work, it's
curious to note that the script never fully puts
to use Angel's past as an ex-Marine. Bobby is the
hot-head criminal, and that comes through loud and
clear in his actions. Of course being a former
Marine doesn't mean Angel has any special
abilities, but since the script brought it up,
you'd think they would at least use it to some
degree.
If you were in the mood for cinematic gunplay,
you could do worst than "Four Brothers".
Despite what the ads may say, the film does
in fact qualify as an action film, which
unfortunately also means it takes great liberties
with logic. There are whole chunks of the story
that wouldn't pass the laugh test when it comes to
believability, such as the crooked cop angle,
which plays out as ridiculously silly. To wit: if
you get into a fight with another cop in a pool
hall, then runs after him and shoots him behind
said pool hall seconds later, wouldn't someone
know "two black kids" didn't shoot the
other cop and run off as you claim, but actually
you were the culprit? Apparently not, because our
killer cop gets away scot free, despite having
already been implicated in another crime.
Nevertheless, for what it is,
"Four Brothers" is slightly a cut above
the usual
Hollywood
fare. Singleton shows good control of the action
scenes, in particular the brutal shoot-out at the
Mercer home, which seems to go on forever as the
bodies pile up in the snow. And although the film
could have ended on a stronger note -- we get, of
all things, a fist fight on a frozen landscape --
"Four Brothers" works well enough that I
wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for those
searching for a passable revenge film, but minus
the raw intensity of other revenge films such as
Tony Scott's "Man
on Fire". |
