On the western front, the shabby Detroit neighborhood makes a nifty urban stand-in for a ramshackle frontier town, and the frozen snow-covered surface of what could be Lake Erie is as empty as any wind-swept plain. Late in the film, thugs wielding chainsaws prepare a wintry grave by cutting a hole in the ice; moments later, a lone gunman strides slowly into view for a final reckoning amid a cluster of hulking black automobiles.
Four Brothers has an elaborate plot, whose elements are unsatisfactorily pieced together between action sequences. The brothers determine that Evelyn's death was a contract killing involving a life-insurance payoff, a
real-estate scam and corrupt city officials and police officers beholden to Victor Sweet (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an evil uber-thug. Among other stunts, this convincingly scary gangster enjoys humiliating
underlings and their girlfriends by dumping their dinners on the floor of his restaurant and making them grovel for their food on hands and knees.
The movie suspends storytelling for several superbly coordinated action sequences, including a slippery car chase over icy streets and a machine-gun invasion of the Mercer home that shows it to be as porous as a cardboard box. But as sleekly directed and edited as it may be, Four Brothers is really made of the same flimsy material.
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