Four Brothers (Widescreen)
Picture: B-
Sound: B- Extras: C Film: C-
Two careers in trouble combine to make one of the biggest
disappointments in 2005 is John Singleton’s Four Brothers, an extremely
misguided remake of the John Wayne 1965 hit The Sons Of Katie Elder. Since he abandoned serious filmmaking after Rosewood,
Singleton has been directing nothing but awful commercial films. To make things worse, he has Mark Wahlberg
as one of the four male leads, bringing the actor back to his misguided path of
finding the worst possible remakes to do after horrid revisitings and
“reimaginings” of Charade, Planet Of The Apes and the slightly
more bearable Italian Job.
Despite a good start, this film just gets worse and worse and
worse. Too bad I Love Huckabees
(reviewed elsewhere on this site) was a case of temporary artistic sanity.
He plays one of four adopted young men who were raised by
a loving mother in a neighborhood that might have been prosperous at one time,
but the end of the industrial era in the U.S. has turned into an area in
decline. He reunites with his three
other brothers (model Tyrese Gibson, singer/musician André Benjamin and
newcomer actor Garrett Hedlund) at their mother’s house. Off the bat, instead of immediately seeing
if the death during a robbery was more than happenstance, they hang around,
talk, reflect too long, then play street hockey before even investigating!
Instantly, the film looses credibility and starts to get
into all kinds of trouble. The acting
is not bad, but not always great. The
faint shell of the original holds the film together by default, but not by
much. Instead of the heart, soul and
realism of Singleton’s debut feature Boyz N The Hood, we get the kind of
Colors-era production that only differs by flushing out the characters a
bit more, but wallows in the supposed dark realism it is portraying. To say any more will sound like this critic
is sarcastically pinpointing the film, though there is not much to ruin, except
more illogic. No wonder it did not find
an audience.
The anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image was shot in
Super 35 by Peter Menzies, Jr., A.C.S., who keeps the film more bearable, with
competent visuals. The Video Black is a
little weak, as expected, but it plays well enough for an urban drama. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is not bad and
instead of Hip Hop songs all over the place, has Motown and other older
pre-Disco R&B hits. That does not
change the look and feel of this being from the modern era, nor does that make
us take the film more seriously, give it more of a soul or make it more
intelligent. Extras include preview
trailers for this and a few other Paramount releases, 9 deleted scenes that
deserved to go, four featurettes and a Singleton commentary. The film is even rated R, but the freedom
that rating grants actually backfired on the film as well. A huge disappointment overall!
- Nicholas Sheffo
