Four Brothers

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Let’s share this joyous holiday with my review of the 2005 movie, “Four Brothers.” This movie, directed by John Singleton, is an urban Western, or an urban movie inspired to be a Western. Whatever the case, it’s planned to be mythic than realistic. It pieces together with fundamental moral currents exactly like Westerns used to be, before greed, fear, anger, and “society” provided action movies with all the motivation they needed.

The movie starts with a sweet looking grandmother who arrives in a Detroit convenience store late at night. Wrong store, wrong neighborhood, we’re thinking (Ebert asks, “was it only last week that somebody was gunned down in a store just like this in "November"?”). But Evelyn Mercer, played by Finnoula Flanagan, has a reason to be there: A scared young boy (Tahliel Hawthorne) has been caught shop-lifting some candy and she handles the situation with the store owner (Pablo Silveira) and makes the kid scared of God. The two stickup men, played by Richard Chevolleau and Awaovieyi Agie, walk into the store and Evelyn is shot.

At the funeral, we meet her four adopted sons, two black, two white. She was always a foster mother, and these were the only four she couldn’t find homes for: Bobby (Mark Wahlberg), Angel (Tyrese Gibson), Jeremiah (Andre Benjamin) and Jack (Garrett Hedlund). Bobby is the oldest, the Leonardo of the brothers, and has a temper. Angel is the cool guy with the hot Spanish girlfriend, played by Sofia Vergara, currently playing Gloria Delgado-Pritchett in the sitcom "Modern Family." Jeremiah is the successful one. He’s married to Taraji P. Henson, has a family and has a job with a real estate deals. Jack, as Ebert puts it, “is a rock-and-roller.”

They all have the name Mercer and they all look at Evelyn as their mother, but they grew up on bad streets and have not spent a lot of time getting all sentimental about being “brothers.” All of that changes at the funeral, when they all agree that their mother’s death needs vengeance. Jeremiah, the businessman, says, “The people who did this are from the same streets we're from. Mom would have been the first to forgive them.” That would have been the truth about Evelyn, but not these four.

Ebert said in his review, “This story is inspired by Henry Hathaway's "The Sons of Katie Elder" (1965), unseen by me but cited by my fellow critic Emanuel Levy. (I am awed by the number of films I have seen, and awed by the number I have not seen.)” First off it looks like an open-and-close case: Witnesses saw two members of a street gang walk in and shoot the store owner. Mom was a bystander, shot in cold blood. As the brothers look at the tape from the security camera, they’re shock by how cruelly she was murdered. They look at the evidence thinking that there’s possibly something more to the murder. Ebert also mentions, “As long as we're talking about the influence of old movies, a crucial clue in "Four Brothers" involves when the lights are turned off on a basketball court; I was reminded of the almanac in John Ford's "Young Mr. Lincoln" (1939) that provides the phases of the moon.”

He goes on by saying, “I won't describe the rest of the plot, which unfolds like a police procedural, but I will note a nice touch involving the way Jeremiah looks guilty for a moment simply because he is successful and generous. And I'll mention the key supporting characters.” Terence Howard and Josh Charles play two cops on the case, and Chiwetel Ejofor, who in reality is one of the nicest men out there, plays one of the biggest jerks in all of Detroit. He’s a crime boss whose tactics for overwhelming his minions pass beyond more cruelty into uncontrolled skill.

For John Singleton, the movie is a return to inner-city areas after some reasonably wild departures (“Shaft,” “2 Fast 2 Furious”). Between those two movies he made “Baby Boy” in 2001, and since I haven’t seen that one, I’ll let Ebert describe the movie, “which attacks some young black men who feel licensed to live at home with their mothers, thoughtlessly father children, avoid work, and perpetuate the cycle. That had the kind of critical insight into the kinds of realities that distinguish his first, and greatest, film, "Boyz N the Hood" (1991). (Singleton is also the producer of the current drama "Hustle & Flow," a more ambitious and insightful urban film that also uses the talents of Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson.)” “Four Brothers” wants basically for its audience to be entertained, although on purpose it makes the point that in an increasingly diverse society, people of different races may be related.

“Four Brothers” works as an urban thriller, if not exactly as a means of logic. For instance, there’s a violent and extended gun battle which has hundreds of rounds of machine-gun bullets and a pile of corpses, and a cop looks at it as “it looks like self-defense.” Yes, but since the cop can only make that conclusion after the smoke clears, why isn’t there any investigation to clean up the mess? Here’s what Ebert speculated: “I guess I shouldn't ask questions like that in a Western, urban or otherwise; bad guys exist to get shot and good guys exist to shoot them, with a few key exceptions to keep things interesting.” If you want to know the end results to this case, you would have to switch this film into a courtroom genre.

Anyways, I hope everyone has a nice Thanksgiving. I know I’m excited tonight when I get a piece of that turkey for dinner. Stay tuned tomorrow when I look at the latest Transformers movie.