The Unseen Movie Review

Four Brothers

It really is about time director John Singleton got back on form. Since his debut with the superb, genre-defining 1991 gangsta flick Boyz n the Hood, he’s been involved with very little decent, first selling out to do Michael Jackson videos, more recently helming the pointless remake of blaxploitation classic Shaft and the even more pointless 2 Fast 2 Furious.

Sadly, however, this bears all the signs of being another dud. For starters, of the four leads, three are pop stars, the other a male model – and two of the pop stars are models on the side. To be fair, one of the leads is former New Kid on the Block Mark Wahlberg, who has turned in decent performances in the likes of Boogie Nights and Three Kings in the past – but he has failed to impress on screen for nigh on six years now. The others are Outkast’s André 3000, who has shown some promise but has yet to prove himself as an actor, R&B star Tyrese, and Garrett Hedlund, whose first acting gig was in the disappointing Troy as Patroclus – Achilles’ gay lover in the original classic story, but a relative nonentity in the film version thanks to American squeamishness over homosexuality.

These four – two black, two white – play deliberately unlikely brothers from a rough part of town, reunited after the unsolved murder of their adoptive mother in a bid to track down her killer. Naturally enough jocular racial tension – with a few undertones of real problems – and outsiders’ confusion ensue as they re-acquaint themselves with the grimy neighbourhood their mother called home. And then it all goes a bit silly.

This whole mixed race brothers thing could have had some interesting potential in more capable hands – and certainly with a more interesting script. Four guys coming to terms with their differences and similarities, a bonding between the races – a perfect example of the tension the US has been wrestling with since before the Civil War, what the likes of Martin Luther King preached about, which remains a major issue in certain parts of America to this day.

But no, a social character drama wouldn’t have had as much box office potential as a silly conspiracy thriller with lots of guns and fights, and so the central conceit of these guys being brothers, rather than merely a mismatched group of friends, is soon effectively dropped. The kinds of sibling rivalries that pop up are not only tedious, but would logically have been dealt with years ago if these people had actually been brought up together.

But shhh! What’s important here is not characterisation, it’s shouty Marky Mark and his non-actor friends charging around trying to look hard. The trouble is, although they all try their best, they simply aren’t remotely believable as tough guys – especially Wahlberg. Despite his famously toned torso from those Calvin Klein underwear ads, he’s only really any good at playing people who are a bit wimpy. The rugged, punch-happy version simply doesn’t work. And as he’s the only one of the leads with any real claim to being more than just a pop star or a model, if he’s not up to scratch, the entire movie’s going to fall down. Which it promptly does.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 4:22 AM