Four Brothers: Critic Reviews

Why is Four Brothers so cheesy? Why does it look like junk? Why are the lines so oafish, the scenes so sloppily pasted together, and the characters so false?

Four Brothers has an elaborate plot, whose elements are unsatisfactorily pieced together between action sequences.

The sometimes absurd Brothers works only on a larger-than-life level. But on that level, the zest is back.

Loud, stupid, unrealistic, overdone, without a thought in its ugly little head and kind of enjoyable.

If Four Brothers spent half as much energy making us feel something for its heroes as it spent making us feel nothing for their victims, it would be a far better, and far more engaging, film.

Brothers is a faux-low-budget revenge thriller, pure and simple. There's nothing special about it, and that's what's refreshing.

Unremarkably schizophrenic -- half gritty sojourn into the inner-city furnace, half Hollywood brain death.

If you can overcome the graphic nature of its casual violence, it is a lot of fun.

As a vivid, bloody piece of escapist gimmickry, it works.

The fatal flaw of John Singleton's latest and most mainstream offering is an off-the-rails narrative that adds up to one giant 'Huh?'

[Four Brothers] connects with underlying moral currents in the way Westerns used to, back before greed, fear, anger and 'society' provided action movies with all the motivation they needed.

Singleton, whose feature film career got off to a terrific start with Boyz N the Hood (1991), delivers this proficiently made factory job with some snap.

Easily the best 1975 B-movie made in 2005, Four Brothers is a raucously entertaining vigilante film.

An unsavory and unsatisfying blend of bone-splintering sadism and doofus slapstick comedy.

Ridiculously violent, crude, homophobic, brash and often plain absurd.

Making sense isn't a top priority for Four Brothers.

When Singleton kicks out the jams during the hard-core rough stuff ... helmer delivers the goods with edgy kinetic flair.

Moment to moment, the mood flips from crime drama to weird high jinks; the boys spend so much time wearing their mother's clothing and playfully accusing each other of being gay that it's not clear they really care about solving the mystery.

As long as the action snaps and the violence feels (somewhat) righteous, there'll always be a place for movies such as Four Brothers -- on rainy Saturdays, on TNT.

Most distressing, however, isn't the movie's high tide of bogus gangsta posturing, but its genuinely idiotic and irresponsible glorification of precisely the attitudes that Boyz n the Hood once depicted as vapid, self-replicating and suicidal.

All that's missing from Four Brothers' battery of macho cliches is a speedboat chase, a role for Carl Weathers and a villain with a pet cobra.

As an absurd riff on baadasssss gangsta movies, Four Brothers has an undeniable visceral kick.

What holds us are the actors, including Terrence Howard as a cop who grew up with the brothers.

Four Brothers takes some pains to add an emotional overlay to the proceedings, to connect, albeit roughly, with the notion that a character's humanity can be part of the on-screen equation.