E-Mail This Article to a Friend FOUR BROTHERS

120 MINUTES | In a premise that sounds better suited to an SNL sketch, four street-tough adopted brothers, two white and two black, band together to avenge their mother’s murder in the badlands of Detroit. Mark Wahlberg’s Bobby, the lawbreaking but good-hearted eldest, grab-asses and galvanizes lothario Angel (Tyrese Gibson), troubled punk-rocker Jack (Garrett Hedlund), and struggling family man Jeremiah (André Benjamin) into a team who must take down corruption in high places to achieve justice. Justice in this case is vigilantism, so you have to wonder why mom’s smiling spirit, having made a visit to correct the boys’ table manners at a mawkish Thanksgiving dinner, is absent when they gun down helpless evildoers in cold blood. Director John Singleton gets credit for espousing racial equality but loses points for the film’s taint of homophobia and misogyny. There’s no faulting the boys’ off-color camaraderie, however, or Singleton’s endorsement of organized labor in a last-minute twist.