Four Brothers by John Singleton on Netflix
My rating: 4 out of 10 stars
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.
This movie sounded rather good when I read about it. I do like a good revenge movie. Unfortunately it did not exactly live up to expectations. This is more an amateur rampage than a planned attempt to find out who the culprit is and exact revenge. A good chunk of the movie is spent with the four brothers mouthing off at each other. Another good chunk is spent with them very amateurishly running around waving guns and “interrogating” people. Somehow, mostly by sheer luck, they actually manage to get closer to their goal. Even the good cop in the movie behaves as a bloody amateur when confronted with what he knows is a crooked cop and of course gets the short end of the stick for his efforts.
As if the amateurish behavior of the four brothers was not annoying enough they have thrown in a hysterical, supposedly Italian, girlfriend who is dumber than a doornail and excruciatingly frustrating when she shows up shouting, screaming and generally tries to sabotage the brothers attempts to get anywhere.
The only thing mildly intelligent and entertaining about this movie was the ending when the brothers confronted the crooked cop and the main bad guy. I have to say that I did not see that coming. Otherwise the movie was pretty null to me. Technically it had no problem. It was decent enough shot and the actors did a quite good job of the roles they were given. It fell down big time on the script however. At least for me.
PG's Ramblings 