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This taut urban drama about four adopted brothers avenging the murder of their mother owes a lot to The Sons of Katie Elder, a 1965 horse opera that starred John Wayne and Dean Martin. In fact, this latest movie from director John Singleton (Shaft) owes a great deal to the western; its central conceit -- the desire for revenge driven by a code of familial loyalty -- has animated literally hundreds of movies in that genre. By setting the action in decaying Detroit during winter, Singleton trades picturesque vistas for the stark, gritty cityscape where crime and corruption run rampant, forcing the film’s protagonists to go outside the law in their quest for justice. Mark Wahlberg, Andre Benjamin (of rap duo Oukast), Tyrese Gibson, and Garret Hedlund play the racially mixed siblings whose love for their recently slain mother, Evelyn Mercer (Fionnula Flanagan), compels them to buck the police (represented by Terrence Howard, one of 2005’s rising stars, playing a sympathetic detective) and various politicians in their campaign against a local crime boss (Chiwetel Ejiofor, another actor of color having a tremendous year). Singleton’s previous movies haven’t always been dramatically or directorially cohesive, but Four Brothers represents a quantum leap in his development as a filmmaker. It’s carefully structured, evenly paced, and consistently well acted. The sometimes brutal action sequences aren’t just dropped into the narrative to artificially speed things up; they are organic to the plot and extremely well staged -- especially a protracted shootout at the Mercer home. The performances are uniformly exemplary, with Wahlberg especially good as the grim, taciturn brother who ramrods the revenge effort. Ed Hulse

All Movie Guide

Four men come together to find out how and why the woman who raised them was killed in this hard-edged urban drama from director John Singleton. Short-tempered Bobby (Mark Wahlberg), struggling musician Jack (Garrett Hedlund), streetwise Angel (Tyrese Gibson), and hard-working Jeremiah (Andre Benjamin) are four guys who don't appear to have much in common, in terms of either race or temperament. However, these men have one very important bond -- all four were adopted and raised by the same woman (Fionnula Flanagan), and they all love her as a mother, and respect one another as brothers. When their mother is killed during a robbery at a grocery store, the four brothers come together for the funeral, but when they don't get straight answers about what happened to her, they begin looking into the crime themselves. The deeper they dig into the case, the more the brothers begin to suspect that the shooting wasn't an accident, and that powerful and unexpected forces were involved. Four Brothers marked one of the first starring roles for Andre Benjamin, better known as Andre 3000 of the top selling hip-hop group OutKast. Mark Deming

Product Details

• UPC: 097363440741
• Source: PARAMOUNT
• Time: 1:48:00
• Sales Rank: 14,941