Vigilante actions speak louder than words

By Stephen Holden
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE , NEW YORK
Friday, Oct 14, 2005, Page 16

Film Notes: Four Brothers Directed by: John Singleton Starring: Mark Wahlberg (Bobby Mercer), Tyrese Gibson (Angel Mercer), Andre Benjamin (Jeremiah Mercer), Garrett Hedlund (Jack Mercer), Terrence Howard, (Lieutenant Green), Josh Charles (Detective Fowler) Running time: 109 minutes Taiwan Release: Today

The director John Singleton knows about desolation. In his atmospheric, propulsive and ultimately preposterous melodrama, Four Brothers, the pictures of snow drifting over a decrepit Detroit neighborhood in the post-Thanksgiving gloom can put a lump in your throat, especially because these images are associated with the murder of a saintly mother figure. Add some faded holiday decorations along with the plaintive cry of Marvin Gaye's Trouble Man, and you have a mood of cosmic sadness laced with fear and loathing.

That maternal angel, gentle, gray-haired Evelyn Mercer (Fionnula Flanagan), is shot to death just before Thanksgiving in a

convenience-store robbery moments after she has persuaded a youngster to give back the candy bar he has just stolen. The movie is discreet enough not to show the killing directly. The camera gallantly retreats to the sidewalk, from which we see the flashes of gunfire inside and know

immediately what has happened. That's the last time this gleefully amoral vigilante movie shows any such discretion.

In short order, Evelyn's four adopted sons, two of them white and two black, gather in their childhood home, and the movie kicks into violent action.

Swaggering, trigger-happy Bobby (Mark Wahlberg) is newly released from prison. He is joined by Angel (Tyrese Gibson), a former marine, who quickly hooks up with an ex-girlfriend (Sofia Vergara); Jeremiah (Andre Benjamin), a former

union organizer now married with two children and dabbling in real estate; and Jack (Garrett Hedlund), a would-be punk rocker and the movie's least developed character, whom Bobby affectionately dubs "the little fairy."

Reuniting the house where they grew up, the foster brothers shed collective tears of grief (to the sounds of the Temptations' I Wish It Would Rain), and agree that being rescued by Evelyn from the foster-care system saved them from much worse fates. Or as the movie's one likable cop, Lieutenant Green (Terrence Howard), a childhood friend who knew them way back when, says, compared to what they might have become without Evelyn's devotion, the four are "congressmen."

Not quite, as it turns out. Goaded by Bobby over a subdued Thanksgiving dinner, they vow to avenge her murder without police assistance. The movie's notion of law and order belongs strictly to the Dodge City school of urban street justice. The sadness dissipates into gore. As their investigation accelerates, their loathsome sleuthing techniques include disrupting a basketball game by running onto the court waving guns, dousing a car with gasoline and

threatening the driver with incineration, and cutting the rope of a man dangling from a building.

Four Brothers, directed by Singleton from a screenplay by David Elliot and Paul Lovett, bears a distant resemblance to Henry Hathaway's 1965 western, The Sons of Katie Elder, in which four brothers, led by John Wayne and Dean Martin, return to their hometown of Clearwater, Texas, after the deaths of their parents. Here, Wahlberg, at his most menacing and cheerfully psychopathic, has the Wayne role of head gunslinger.

The movie is a shrewd hybrid of

traditional western and modern blaxploitation movies, with vintage Motown hits

supplying pungent nostalgic whiffs from the Shaft and Superfly era while undercurrents of hip-hop keep it up to date.

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.