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Four Brothers So you've got a script that demands a hard man. A real hard man, no namby pamby brutal stares and little action, this man has to shoot, stab and kill. But then again, you're not looking for old timer Schwarzenneger or Vin Diesel. This script has class. This script has a message. So you pick Mark bloody Wahlberg. Wahlberg is not a hard man. He isn't believable, no matter how much he bulks up and swaggers around in his hooded top. Truly terrifying hard man don't have to do that. Think of Don Logan in Sexy Beast. Ben Kingsley transforms from Gandhi to one of the most toe-curlingly terrifying criminals ever to grace the screen; and yet he doesn't need to put ten stone on around his face - which is obviously Wahlberg's version of method acting.
It's October in Detroit, Michigan. Bad boy Bobby Mercer (Wahlberg) has returned home for his adopted mother's funeral. His three adopted brothers–Angel (Tyrese Gibson), Jeremiah (André Benjamin) and Jack (Garrett Hedlund) also return to pay their respects. And just in case we don't get it from their swagger, these men are not nice. In the most clunky, blatantly obvious exposition, we view two policemen watching the Mercer brothers at their mother's wake. Conveniently, one of the cops is new, so the old timer tells him in detail about each brother. In the past they've been to prison, got "in with some gangsters", play a mean game of ice-hockey and are all-round headcases.
The cop tells newbie that their adopted mother Evelyn (Fionnula Flanagan) fostered hundreds of children over the years in the transition between the children's home and adoption, but there were only four that she couldn't get adopted into proper homes, only four that were lost causes. Welcome to the Mercer family. The police meander over to check out the action, and Bobby—being a disrespectful hot headed kinda guy—tells them straight. He didn't come back for no funeral. He came back to sort out the guys who shot his mom, because the cops "couldn't find a pair of tits in a strip bar". You tell 'em Bobby.
After the wake, the brothers cook Thanksgiving dinner and sit around the table together, united again in their tragedy. However, none of the actors have the ability to adequately convey the grief required of them. Each in turn stares at mamma's empty chair at the dining table, top lip-a-trembling and it just doesn't cut it. These quivering mouth moments are intercut with the brothers' visual "memories" of Evelyn at the table, she's telling the boys to sit up straight and eat with their mouths shut, she's smiling and cast in sickly soft white light. She tells Angel not to worry about his new tattoo, cos she's such a hip grandma she's got one too! And so the schmaltz continues to pile on until I feel like crying too (but not for the same reasons as the Mercer boys).
The dialogue is beyond ropey. The line "I wanna know who shot mom!" and its slight variations (including Bobby killing two men and announcing "They shot mom!") is uttered over and over by the brothers and must account for at least 50% of the script. The police seem equally inarticulate, describing the aftermath of a shoot out as "maximum ugly". Unintentional hilarity ensues.
The brothers begin to dispatch their own version of the Mercer law across the streets of Detroit, and soon discover that it wasn't a bungled grocery store hold-up that resulted in their mother's shooting. It was a planned execution of this lovely white haired old Mrs Mercer (who disturbingly resembles Miss Marple tramping the streets of Detroit). Jack says "I just don't get it. Why would someone hire a goddamn contract killer to kill mom?" Their increasingly brutal trail, headed by Bobby, leads them through the Detroit underworld and, after several car chases, bodies thrown out of windows and deaths, leads them to Victor Sweet (Chiwetel Ejiofor).
But Sweet is real bad, and they are repeatedly warned "Y'all don't you who ya messin wi!" Just to show us how tough Sweet is, there is a scene in a restaurant where Sweet ridicules his associates, underlings and paid-off policemen. It comes across like some awful symbiosis of the Shaft remake (which hey! Singleton also directed) meets Goodfellas, and attempts to conjure up that knee-trembling moment when Joe Pesci begins his "What the fuck is so funny about me?" diatribe to the increasingly concerned Ray Liotta. The difference is that where Martin Scorsese knew to finely draw the Goodfellas line, Singleton has Sweet making them eat off the floor like dogs, then gets their women down there to join them. Phew, that sure is going to make them mad, ain't it? Might make them want to turn against him? The plot line is so obvious that the viewer is always ten steps ahead of Bobby and his brothers, and correctly guesses what will happen next
But Four Brothers thinks it is a film about race as well. The four adopted brothers are two white and two black, and to be honest, any of the characters could have been any combination of colours and it wouldn't make any difference at all. While Singleton has previously made a success out of exploring ghetto tensions of South Central LA in 1991's Boyz n the Hood, the main reason Four Brothers seems to have this racial brotherly structure is in order to demonstrate that you don't have to be blood brothers to be brothers, and it doesn't matter what your skin colour is. This is a worthy message but it just seems to fall rather flat, when the rest of the film attempts to make race such an overt issue.
Four Brothers is like a bad Seventies chase film gone wrong, a piss take that is willfully serious to the point where you have to cover your mouth to muffle the laughter forcing its way out. But there are a couple of positive points to the film. Exempting Wahlberg, the acting is fair. André Benjamin as Jeremiah is the most convincing and well rounded of the characters, and both Jeremiah and Jack are likeable. As Jack, Garrett Hedlund is there to slouch around looking pretty and he does this very effectively. At least one of the points in the rating I've given this film is down to the sight of him climbing out of the shower butt-naked and dripping wet. Unfortunately the scene was rather spoiled by Wahlberg's inclusion - sat on the bathroom toilet with his pants round his fat ankles. Another point was scored for the absolutely cracking soundtrack - featuring Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Jackson 5 and Four Tops - and finally for the location shooting. The exterior mise-en-scéne is really effective. While I don't know if Four Brothers was actually filmed in Detroit, it certainly looks like it was, and conveys a much-needed boost of reality to the proceedings. But, to be honest, the offerings at your local cinema would have to be really dire before I could recommend going to see this.
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