Four Brothers

Four Brothers (2005) is set in Detroit. A woman who adopted four difficult boys years earlier is killed in a shop, and the four come home for the funeral. The police treat it as a random robbery. The brothers do not. The film is a rearrangement of a classic western, the template of The Sons of Katie Elder: a parent dead, siblings returning, a town running on rot. John Singleton moves that to contemporary Detroit with the city's economic collapse behind it. Singleton's best known film was Boyz n the Hood; this is one of his moves towards straight genre work. The cast is deliberately mixed: two of the four brothers are Black and two are white, and the film handles it in one line without explaining anything. Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese Gibson, André Benjamin and Garrett Hedlund play them. The car chase on snow is the sequence people remember. It runs 109 minutes. Good for: revenge stories, films about brothers, and hard eighties style action. Less good for: the violence is heavy and the brothers' methods are never questioned. There are almost no women in it. The plot settles into a familiar conspiracy shape in the second half.