Directrospective: FOUR BROTHERS (2005)

Notes on the films of American director John Singleton.

Sorry, everybody - I couldn’t find any information on how many people this movie is about or what their relationship is to one another.

Sometimes you want a movie to wash over you like a feeling, leaving you deeply affected but not quite sure what it all meant. Something like MULHOLLAND DR., or Dario Argento’s SUSPIRIA, or 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Other times, a movie is concerned with an issue so pressing that you want it to grab you by the shoulders and scream into your face, “This is what I have been about!” DO THE RIGHT THING comes to mind (as do many other Spike Lee films), or THE 400 BLOWS, or Bong Joon-Ho’s MEMORIES OF MURDER. John Singleton’s debut, BOYZ N THE HOOD, is a movie of the latter kind. It ends where it begins, with the title in white on a black screen. This time, though, the title sits atop the words “INCREASE THE PEACE.” It’s blunt and it’s unsubtle, but that’s what’s great about it. It’s a young director’s honest plea to a community in crisis: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, that sort of thing.

FOUR BROTHERS, the second-to-last film Singleton would ever direct, feels like a feature-length refutation of BOYZ N THE HOOD’s final frame. It’s an unkind, unpleasant film all about how cool it is to Decrease The Peace, about how actually the good guys will stop taking out eyes as soon as they’re done blinding all the bad guys, so don’t worry about it. Coming from the director of BOYZ, it’s a huge fuckin’ bummer.

At least he didn’t write it. The script, by David Elliot and Paul Lovett, is a very loose contemporary take on THE SONS OF KATIE ELDER, following four adult brothers (oh, I get the title now) who reunite in Detroit after their adoptive mother Evelyn Mercer (Fionnula Flanagan) is killed in an armed robbery. Saintly Evelyn took them all in as troubled children whom the foster system had failed, and they’ve grown into men of varying decency: Bobby (Mark Wahlberg) and Angel (Tyrese Gibson, who’s now been in three Singleton films in a row) still lead lives of crime, while Jack (Garrett Hedlund) is a hard-living rock star and Jeremiah (Outkast’s André Benjamin) is a fully upstanding member of the community with his own construction business and some truly marvelous sweaters and cold-weather trousers. Singleton’s regular costumer designer (and Spike Lee’s, and extremely deserving Academy Award winner for BLACK PANTHER) Ruth E. Carter always delivers.

Quickly, the brothers suspect there might be more to Evelyn’s death than what’s in the police report, and they start to do some digging for themselves. They disagree about what they’re going to do when they find out what really happened, each according to his level of degeneracy, but one thing they all agree on is that they loved their mother and they want her murderer to see some kind of justice. When we’re introduced to the Mercers by way of helpful rundown by Police Lieutenant Green (Terrence Howard) to his partner, Detective Fowler (Josh Charles), it’s not totally clear just what kind of crime life Bobby and Angel have been living. Seeing as they’re two of the four heroes, my assumption was that it was probably stuff like larceny, smuggling, intimidation, maybe some assault and battery on people who would likely have done worse themselves. Behavior that’s frowned upon, without question, but not as irredeemable as rape or murder. I just assumed they weren’t capable of that sort of thing because we’re supposed to be rooting for them and they live in the United States in 2005 instead of the Wild West or 1920s Chicago or Middle-Earth or whatever. You can imagine my surprise when, having learned that Evelyn’s murder was an organized hit disguised as an armed robbery, the four brothers track down her killers and Bobby and Angel shoot them in the fucking head execution-style. You might imagine my further surprise when, having witnessed their brothers’ graceful and effortless headshotting, Jack and Jeremiah don’t run screaming from the car and straight to the cops. They object, but they’re not going to stop being brothers just because Bobby and Angel are clearly capable of taking many, many lives. There’s no indication that FOUR BROTHERS is going to be this kind of movie until all of a sudden it’s very much this kind of movie.

At this point we’re introduced to the villain, Victor Sweet (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a fur-coated, full-on sadistic mob boss out of a late Blaxploitation film, and the fundamental issue with FOUR BROTHERS becomes clear. The black-and-white opening sequence, the Motown soundtrack, the overabundant squibs, the total disregard for human life, all of it is in service of a grindhouse pastiche that Singleton called “one of those ‘Saturday Night Special’ movies.” It doesn’t take place in the real world, or in the slightly melodramatized version of it in which BOYZ and POETIC JUSTICE and HIGHER LEARNING are set. It takes place in the movie-movie world of genre and exploitation films, where killing is easy and meaningless, and if someone is bad they deserve to die in a brutal and visually distinctive way. I don’t have a problem with that sort of thing on principle. Most exploitation movies are crushingly boring, but the ones that are good are great. Sometimes you want mean-spirited, nihilist trash. And far be it from me to squib-shame; I like Tarantino as much as any other cishet white guy who owns a television. But John Singleton is the filmmaker who took the time in BOYZ N THE HOOD to show us Ricky’s killers having some burgers and fries and clowning on each other like teenagers before Doughboy pulled up and blew them away, and who had Jody in BABY BOY come home from a shooting he took part in to sit in front of a mural of Tupac and think about killing himself. His greatest films are about deconstructing images of violent masculinity, about humanizing the criminal characters who in other movies would just make a mean face and then get killed by the hero, about how violence only begets more violence and now, thanks to Doughboy, Ricky is still dead and so are even more young Black men. This film leaves the same bad taste that SHAFT does precisely because it’s from the filmmaker who made us think about the real lives of each nameless mean-faced guy. You can make UNFORGIVEN after you make HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER and it profoundly recontextualizes what’s come before; when you make them the other way around, you’ve harshed the buzz and the tasteless dumb fun thing isn’t fun anymore.

Many, many more people die by the end of FOUR BROTHERS, almost all of them nameless and almost all of them shown to deserve their fate because they work for the bad guy. There’s a bizarre twist in which Sweet’s henchmen reveal that they have decided to unionize and, seizing the means of production by his fur coat, toss Sweet into icy Lake St. Clair to his death, and this just makes all those shootouts even ickier. If only those goons hadn’t been assigned to those particular assaults on the Mercer house, maybe they too could have joined the International Brotherhood of Henchmen. It’s a devastating thought. Maybe all of this is an elaborate complicit critique of hyperviolent vigilante films, but coming from the man who was unafraid to end a film with the words “INCREASE THE PEACE,” I get the feeling that FOUR BROTHERS is saying exactly what it seems to be saying. Too bad.