Rating:***/*****
There's a shoot-out between critics over John Singleton's Four Brothers that rivals anything seen in the movie itself. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times bestows three stars on the movie and remarks that while it "wants basically to be an entertainment ... it deliberately makes the point that in an increasingly diverse society, people of different races may belong to the same family.
" (The point is embodied by the four brothers of the title, two white and two black, raised by a white foster mother who is murdered at the outset of the film.) Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Daily News describes it as "a rousing revenge flick that delivers the goods with a mixture of tight action, vivid performances and an old-school soundtrack that evokes the best of blaxploitation cinema.
" Lisa Kennedy in the Denver Post remarks that the film might be criticized as old-fashioned, then adds: "Listen up: If old-fashioned is just code for leaving the theater smiling, sign me up." Like several other critics, Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer thinks of the film as a kind of contemporary B-movie. "It's your basic patter, car chase and shootout.
No big budget, stars, or computer-generated tricks. Like cheap booze, it does the job," she writes. But Stephen Holden in the New York Times describes the movie as an "atmospheric, propulsive and ultimately preposterous melodrama.
" Ty Burr blames Singleton for the film's problems. "Grubby to look at and edited with a rusty knife, it's a bumptious, low-rent ride and further proof that Singleton, for all his status and acclaim, doesn't have impressive filmmaking chops," he comments. Kyle Smith in the New York Post is less guarded in his review, writing "Four Brothers? Ringling Brothers is more like it, because John Singleton's latest stinks like something the elephants left behind."
