John Singleton has had great artistic success putting a real human face on inner-city streets with the edgy personal films ?Boyz N the Hood? and ?Baby Boy?.?

He?s had solid commercial success piling on action and mayhem with the big, loud Hollywood flicks ?Shaft? and ?2 Fast 2 Furious?.? In ?Four Brothers?, Singleton aims for both, with fitful success at weaving a full-bodied character study within a blood-soaked tale of murder and vengeance.

Singleton is at his best in the movie?s first half, crafting an engaging dynamic among Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese Gibson, Andre Benjamin (Andre 3000 of OutKast) and Garrett Hedlund as adopted siblings reunited in grief and anger after their mother is slain.

After a nice setup as a modern cousin to John Wayne?s Western revenge tale ?The Sons of Katie Elder?, ?Four Brothers? loses dramatic momentum, its credibility undermined amid strained plot twists.

And despite overseeing bigger sequences in ?Shaft? and ?2 Fast 2 Furious?, Singleton falters with the two main action segments here, a choppily edited car chase on snowy streets and a prolonged shootout so statically choreographed the masked gunmen resemble robots.

The most memorable moments of ?Four Brothers? are the quiet times, as the brothers ? hard-luck cases in their younger years ? rekindle sibling bonds and ponder their options over the murder of their mother, Evelyn Mercer (Fionnula Flanagan), shot dead in a store robbery.

Dominant brother Bobby (Wahlberg) is an irritable desperado who seems destined to drift into prison or an early grave. Angel (Gibson) is a ladies man holding to the straight life through a stint in the military. Jeremiah (Benjamin) has become a successful property developer with a nice house and family. Baby brother Jack (Garrett Hedlund) is a tattooed wannabe rocker with an air of doom similar to Bobby?s.

The loving Detroit home their foster mom provided enabled the four boys to grow into honourable, if not exactly respectable, men.

?These kids are congressmen compared to what they would have been,? observes police Lt. Green (Terrence Howard), who?s investigating the slaying with surly partner Fowler (Josh Charles).

Bobby counts on no satisfaction from the police and persuades most of his brothers to join his hunt for payback. They soon learn their mother?s death was not a random shooting, the motive hitting closer to home than any of them could expect.

At this point, the screenplay by David Elliot and Paul Lovett begins to lose its sharp focus on the main characters and veer into a muddled mob story. The provocation for Evelyn?s murder rings false, an awkward means to bring the Mercer boys into conflict with the city?s organised crime heavies.

A side story involving cops Green and Fowler feels tacked on, diluting rather than enriching the central plot.

The considerable violence that erupts seems to occur in a vacuum, Detroit looking like a ghost town. Bystanding at crime and accident scenes is a national pastime, yet the Mercers and their enemies shoot and smash the place up with no one else visible, no one ever calling the police, no one lifting a window curtain to peek outside at the ruckus.

The movie?s heart is the brothers? relationship, particularly the interplay between Wahlberg and Gibson, the singer continuing to develop great screen charm and stature since debuting in the lead role of Singleton?s ?Baby Boy? (Gibson also co-starred in ?2 Fast 2 Furious?).

As Bobby, Wahlberg?s perpetual swagger grows tiresome, but he infuses ?Four Brothers? with wry humour. Some fine comic moments also result from Angel?s love-hate relationship with an old flame (the ravishing Sofia Vergara) and from the paces a crime boss (Chiwetel Ejiofor) puts his hirelings through to humiliate them.

Benjamin?s character is a bit half-baked, yet the actor manages to make Jeremiah a steely presence. Hedlund is the weak link among the four brothers, his lightweight performance lost among the others.

Flanagan strongly registers in a fleeting role, her fantasy flashbacks with the brothers intriguing enough to make you wish Singleton had scrapped the action angle in favor of a straight domestic tale.

Infused with the racy street rhythms Singleton manages so well, the tale of a kindhearted white woman raising four foster boys ? two black, two white ? might have made some story.

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