JC
Four Brothers is the new flick that allows Tyrese, Mark Wahlberg, Andre Benjamin and Garrett Hedlund to be brothers. The four transracial adoptees come together to find their white mother’s killer. Not quite sure about how this will all come off, but I have a bad feeling about it. Yes, it could be one of those neutral depictions that we also like to see, where it’s “just a family that happens to be mixed”…but it’s sounding more like it may come off as transracially adopted kids going crazy and killing. We’ll see…..

Although it’s set in snowy Detroit, “Four Brothers” feels like a Western - specifically, the John Wayne movie “The Sons of Katie Elder.” In both films, four hot-headed siblings reunite to avenge a murder. Here, the gimmick is that the family is biracial. Evelyn Mercer (Fionnula Flannagan) is an aging white do-gooder when she’s gunned down in a ghetto convenience store. Her funeral attracts the four foster kids she’d adopted: hockey-playing parolee Bobby (Mark Wahlberg), ex-Marine playboy Angel (Tyrese Gibson), aspiring rocker Jack (Garrett Hedlund) and dutiful contractor Jerry (the unexpectedly good Andre Benjamin). Only Jerry has a wife and kids, and like the cop who was their childhood playmate (Terrence Howard), he balks at roughing up the local hoods to get the lowdown on the shooting.