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BOND OF BROTHERS
BROTHERS UNDER THE SKIN
Left to right, Jack (Garrett Hedlund), Jeremiah (André Benjamin, Bobby (Mark Wahlberg) and Angel (Tyrese Gibson) as adopted sons returning home to avenge the death of their mother.
four brothers
DIRECTOR JOHN SINGLETON FOLLOWS UP HIS INDIE HIT HUSTLE & FLOW WITH A FILM ABOUT ADOPTED STREET KIDS WHO RETURN HOME AS ADULTS TO AVENGE THE EATH OF THE WOMAN WHO BROUGHT THEM UP. HAL HAYES REPORTS ON FOUR BROTHERS.
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Mark Wahlberg didn’t find it hard to get what John Singleton’s new film was all about. “I grew up in a very poor neighbourhood, the youngest of nine kids, and was constantly surrounded by family, mostly brothers,” says the actor, star of such movies as The Italian Job, Planet of the Apes and The Perfect Storm. “This feels very much like home to me; it feels like going back in time, except that now I’m the oldest. I’m making all the rules, I’m the one beating everyone else up!”
Mind you, what Singleton’s new film is about is made pretty clear by its title: Four Brothers. What the title doesn’t explain, however, is that, since the four brothers are all adopted, they don’t look remotely similar. In fact, two of them - Wahlberg and Garrett Hedlund (seen most recently as Brad Pitt’s cousin, Patroclus, in Troy) - are white, while the other two (Tyrese Gibson and André Benjamin) are black.
All four have long since left home when the movie starts, even teenage Jack (Hedlund), who has headed off to the big city in hope of becoming a rock star. What brings them back together is the death of their adoptive mother, who is murdered during a grocery-store hold-up.
There was another aspect of the story that was familiar to Wahlberg: the tough, urban background against which Four Brothers is set. “The thing about Mark as an actor is that he’s from the streets,” says Singleton, who made his directorial debut 14 years ago with Boyz N the Hood, which was also about ‘the streets’: indeed, it was one of the first films to deal with the gang culture of South Central LA. “Mark reminds me of the actors from the early days of Hollywood that were boxers or wrestlers before they came into the film business,” adds the director. “He had a really hard past before he came into acting and this is a role that really lets him access his background.”
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