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75Four Brothers works as an urban thriller, if not precisely as a model of logic.
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75If you can overcome the graphic nature of its casual violence, it is a lot of fun. The banter among the brothers is well-written and has a genuine fraternal feel to it. And the chases and shootouts have a fresh malevolence to them.
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75Preposterous yet solidly entertaining.
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70Wahlberg, whose Bobby is the kind of guy who enters a room gun first, swinging a can of a gasoline, is the glue that holds everything together; he's perfectly cast and has never given a more persuasive performance.
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70Gripping: Even when it wobbles off-track, it has some juice to it.
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70It's a finely tuned Motor City engine: The action, including a nighttime car chase through a blinding snowstorm, is fast, brutal and efficient; the Motown soundtrack never cuts out; and as a gangster called Sweet, the British-Nigerian actor Chiwetel Ejiofor gives an electrifying performance.
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70With equal measures of rock-the-house vigor and in-your-face attitude, Four Brothers proves usually potent and consistently enjoyable as an old school approach to what might best be described as the urban-Western genre of slam-bang, balls-out action-revenger.
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63What holds us are the actors, including Terrence Howard as a cop who grew up with the brothers.
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Proficiently made trash.
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63Easily the best 1975 B-movie made in 2005, Four Brothers is a raucously entertaining vigilante film.
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63A faux-low-budget revenge thriller, pure and simple. There's nothing special about it, and that's what's refreshing.
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63True, John Ford and John Wayne did this stuff a lot better back in the day, but they're not around anymore. John Singleton is, and it's nice to see someone caring enough to keep the tradition alive.
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60It's more than adequate as an old school action movie slightly updated for modern audiences.
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60Heavy-handed in places and bad news for the Detroit Tourist Commission, this is still a slick, fun ensemble piece and a step back in the right direction for Singleton.
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60A typically energetic urban action melodrama, offering car chases, beatings, murders, a dog mauling, attempted arson, frequent double-crosses and pitched street battles worthy of Fallouja.
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58The casting is hit-and-miss. OutKast's Benjamin and "Troy's" Hedlund are weak, but Gibson is very appealing and the movie powers along on a strong lead performance by Wahlberg, who has never seemed more confident, commanding or scruffily charismatic.
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50If you take any of this seriously, you are not going to enjoy the movie very much. But as an absurd riff on baadasssss gangsta movies, Four Brothers has an undeniable visceral kick.
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50More action directors should include scenes such as the Mercers' extended Thanksgiving dinner, which fleshes out the bond between the brothers without using too many words.
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50Four Brothers immediately joins the Good Idea, Bad Execution club. Hardly anyone seems to care about its believability - not director John Singleton, writers David Elliott and Paul Lovett or some lackadaisical actors.
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50This is the kind of scrappy Seventies-throwback B-movie that fits the bill when you desperately need to see regular-seeming, occasionally inept people rise up against our corrupt criminal oppressors and cudgel them with pool cues and bits of blasted-off brick.
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50What results is unremarkably schizophrenic--half gritty sojourn into the inner-city furnace, half Hollywood brain death.
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50The movie's not great, but Mom might like it.
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50For all its well-drawn lines between good and evil, Four Brothers is ultimately passive entertainment.
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40Atmospheric, propulsive and ultimately preposterous melodrama.
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40Loud, stupid, unrealistic, overdone, without a thought in its ugly little head and kind of enjoyable.
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38Singleton's sloppiest, laziest movie to date, springing to life in fits and starts, risibly mawkish and occasionally gripping, and often feeling like it was made up on the set.
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The director's approach is far too ham-fisted and erratic to bring Four Brothers up to the level of enjoyable trash -- it's too crummy to earn that distinction.
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25Because the script, riddled with verbal ugliness by David Elliot and Paul Lovett, sends the movie to a series of arbitrary nowheres, the final showdown for the Mercer boys and their enemies is just as meaningless and sense-deadening.
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20Four Brothers regresses into gallows comedy, rampant misogyny, and one preposterous Hollywood action setpiece after another.
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20A career low for Mark Wahlberg and director John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood), this ridiculous mean-streets adventure starts out like a Hell's Kitchen melodrama from the 30s and eventually spins off into a series of gunfights, beat downs, and trite Motown numbers.
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Four Brothers? Ringling Brothers is more like it, because John Singleton's latest stinks like something the elephants left behind. It's not clear what the film is trying to do, but it seems safe to guess that it's doing it wrong.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 29 out of 38
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Mixed: 3 out of 38
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Negative: 6 out of 38
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