Family Matters
Wahlberg and Family try to win one for Momma in the cunning "Four Brothers." (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: An old idea with some clever twists...
The Downside: You may think you've seen it before... but you haven't.
John Singleton has made important movies before, but Four Brothers isn't one of them. Singleton got his start in the 1990s making grim, gritty urban dramas like Boyz n the Hood and Poetic Justice. The end of that decade seemed to rattle his cage somewhat, turning him over to flashy cineplex thrill rides like Samuel L. Jackson's Shaft remake and 2003's 2 Fast 2 Furious. Don't think for a moment that this is necessarily a step down, because if Singleton can do weighty (if overwrought) serious drama, there's also no doubt that when the man does pulp, pure genre escapism, he puts some real meat on it and sets it to a boil. Four Brothers isn't the kind of movie that'll inch Singleton closer to any kind of lifetime achievement awards, but it is a Grade A example of how one smart filmmaker can take what is old and make it new again.
How so? It seems serendipitous that Four Brothers comes out the same weekend as The Great Raid, John Dahl's better-than-average World War II pic which harkened back to the days of John Wayne war movies. In the same vein, Four Brothers is kind of an unofficial remake of The Sons of Katie Elder, a 1965 western in which Wayne and Dean Martin played lawless sons out to avenge their wronged parents. Four Brothers transplants the story to modern-day Detroit with the four bruised apples of the Mercer family tree, Bobby (Mark Wahlberg), Angel (Tyrese Gibson), Jerry (Outkast's Andre 3000), and Jack ( Garrett Hudlund), returning home after their adoptive mother, Evelyn (Fionnula Flanagan) is slain in an apparent convenience store robbery. This Fearsome Four were rejects of the foster care system- all apparently too rough for anyone to handle- until ex-hippie and social activist Evelyn took them in and taught them to fly somewhat right ("They're congressmen compared to what they could have been," a local cop observes).
On the surface, there is nothing about the big picture that is spectacular (once the brothers decide to take the law into their own hands it becomes about the 1,000,000th Death Wish clone), but here Singleton works from the ground up, turning every moment 90-degrees of moth-bitten Hollywood cliché. There are no real surprises here, but while we recognize all the hard-worn conventions that are driving the story, they're also turned on their head just enough to seem fresh. In one scene, Singleton stages a wild and exciting downtown car chase that runs on icy roads, making the cars just as likely to run into walls as each other, in the middle of a blizzard. The whole film is also fueled on a dynamic sardonic humor which provides a relieving counter-balance to the hailstorm of flying lead it cooks up and the string of pervasive language. This effort to set things right sets the boys on the trail of Victor Sweet, the kind of all-purpose thug/pimp/drug lord who seems to be created for movies like this, but played by British-born Nigerian actor Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things), Sweet manages to be one of the more memorable characters of the film, if only because of the creative ways he finds to humiliate his underlings (I especially liked the part where he forces an associate who has ratted on him to sit at the kiddie table during a Thanksgiving dinner).
Speaking of Thanksgiving, Ejiofor is just one of a cast that eats through the crackerjack script's off-the-handle kookiness. Wahlberg seems a little out of place (doubly so given that he's supposed to play the baddest bad seed of the lot), but most of the movie's jester-energy runs through him. Andre 3000 puts it in low gear, compared to his amusingly kinetic role as a cartoonish gangsta in March's flop Be Cool, as the only one of the Mercer brothers to "go straight." Recent breakout Terrence Howard (Crash, the recent hip-hop surprise Hustle and Flow) is a stand out as an honest Detroit cop who has some sympathy for the revenge ambitions of the Mercer clan.
You might get that off-put feeling from watching another movie that seems to suggest justice comes sweeter from the barrel of a gun, but nothing about Four Brothers is asking to be taken that seriously. Like Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill epics, Four Brothers isn't about anything more than attitude, smash, and swagger. Singleton has created a wry, smart-aleck, muscular thriller using pieces that had gone rusty long before he was born. He is not trying to escape the concept- just open the windows to air it out a while. Of course, there is little doubt that justice will eventually be served, but in keeping with the movie's winking nature the wrap-up features a pair of the best turn-the-table twists that I've seen in years.
The world of cinema might be better served if someone of Singleton's talent got back to "real work" and made movies with a lot more import than Four Brothers, but then I think we'd also be robbed of the more mischievous side of his nature. Four Brothers is a juicy, zippy, full-bodied specimen of genre filmmaking hooded in a pure damn-the-torpedoes mode. No, this won't win anyone awards, but it is one of the most delicious, bullet-ridden excuses for popcorn kinetics this summer and it is made by a man with enough tried-and-true street-smarts to give us a playful tip of the hat at the same time he's reloading the big guns. A
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