At the funeral, we meet her four adopted sons, two black, two white. She was a foster mother all of her life, and these were the only four she couldn't find homes for: Bobby (Mark Wahlberg), Angel (Tyrese Gibson), Jeremiah (Andre Benjamin) and Jack (Garrett Hedlund). Bobby is the oldest, the natural leader, the one with a temper. Angel is the player with a hot babe (Sofi Vergara). Jeremiah is a success; he's married (to Taraji P. Henson), has a family, is involved in real estate deals. Jack is a rock-and-roller.

They all have the name Mercer and they all consider Evelyn their mom, but they grew up on mean streets and have not spent a lot of time getting all sentimental about being "brothers." That begins to change at the funeral, when they wordlessly agree that their mother's death requires some kind of action. Jeremiah, the businessman, observes: "The people who did this are from the same streets we're from. Mom would have been the first to forgive them." True of Mom, not true of them.

This story is inspired by Henry Hathaway's "The Sons of Katie Elder" (1965), unseen by me but cited by my fellow critic Emanuel Levy. (I am awed by the number of films I have seen, and awed by the number I have not seen.) At first it looks like an open-and-shut case: Witnesses saw two gang-bangers walk in and blast the store owner. Mom was a bystander, shot in cold blood. But as the brothers look at the tape from the security camera, they're struck by how ruthlessly she was murdered; they turn up evidence suggesting maybe there was something more to this killing. As long as we're talking about the influence of old movies, a crucial clue in "Four Brothers" involves when the lights are turned off on a basketball court; I was reminded of the almanac in John Ford's "Young Mr. Lincoln" (1939) that provides the phases of the moon.

I won't describe the rest of the plot, which unfolds like a police procedural, but I will note a nice touch involving the way Jeremiah looks guilty for a moment simply because he is successful and generous. And I'll mention the key supporting characters. Terrence Howard and Josh Charles play the two cops on the case, and Chiwetel Ejiofor ("Dirty Pretty Things"), who is one of the nicest men alive, plays one of the meanest men in Detroit. He's a crime boss whose methods for humbling his underlings pass beyond mere cruelty into demented ingenuity.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46fpq6qXZe%2FsMDHnqmsZWJlfXY%3D