Brothers on the warpath

John Singleton has never made anything as good as Boyz N the Hood, his 1991 debut. But at least Four Brothers is better than his recent pulp-action movies.

It has Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese Gibson, Andre Benjamin and Garrett Hedlund as the adopted brothers determined to punish the gunman who kills their saintly foster mother in a store hold-up.

Apparently inspired by Henry Hathaway's Sixties Western The Sons of Katie Elder, this ough to make two of the two white.

It is convential enough however, to provide them with a cheesy screenplay and to allow them to relapse into a litany of violence as they catch up with Chiwetel Ejiofor's ruthless hoodlum.

As a rip-roaring Brothers suffices, but as a treatise about racial bonding, it skates over every conceivable surface.

Four Brothers
Cert: cert15