Monday, August 29, 2005

Movie Review: Four Brothers

Very good movie. Funny, violent, touching, not too melodramatic. What more could one ask for? I feel strongly that there is a western out there that this movie might be based on, what with the local kingpin character and the honorable/outlaw brothers bent on revenge. Does anyone know what that western might be?

This movie generated one of the more racially-integrated movie audiences you'll see at the movies, at least at the showing we attended, Saturday night in downtown Boston. Given the cast and the plot, with combination good-bad, straight good, and straight bad white and Black characters in every combination, that's not surprising. I would like to see more movies like this, even if the premise is a bit far-fetched. (How many quartets of four foster-child brothers, two Black and two white, all adopted by a white hippie woman, can there be in the U.S. anyway?) Also, I think the Latina character was over-the-top stereotype.

The only silly part was near the end, when Bobby (Mark Wahlberg) shows up in the middle of a frozen lake on foot, to attend a meeting where everyone else has come by car. Presumably, this is Lake St. Clair near Detroit, which is huge. The "meet" was at least four miles from shore. Did Bobby camp out on the lake the night before? Was he dropped by a silent, unseen helicopter? Or did he ride his bicycle out on the ice and then hide it under a pile of snow?

Highly recommended, but quite violent. Stay away if you don't like realistic gun violence.

UPDATE: A reviewer at imdb.com compared this movie to the John Wayne film "The Sons of Katie Elder." Haven't seen that one. Have you?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have -- though The Sons of Katie Elder isn't one of my favorite westerns though my cousin Jem really likes it.

I don't know, I like the Duke (of course) and Elmer Bernstein music (of course) but something about Dean Martin prevents me from ever believing he's in character.

Also I have trouble believing George Kennedy as a bad guy after the Police Squad movies. Though when he gets smacked in the face by Wayne it did definitely not look Leslie Nielsen did it.

From what I can tell the new movie is the exact same plot as Katie Elder -- except Katie Elder dies before the movie starts and I think I saw a commercial with the mom in this one.

C - Log said...

In Four Brothers the mother dies at the very beginning and appears in the rest of the movie as a sort of ghost.

brothers jackets said...

Awesome review man. A big thumbs up from me.

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