Chandleresque is a word that seems to have entered the common vocabulary in our nation. Well, it was in the common vocabulary of us cats at Son and Foe for a couple of years before that happened, and we’re delighted to see the change. At the same time, we’re a little disgusted at its overusage. Not everything with cynicism, wisecracks, complications, and violence deserves the term. Raymond Chandler’s act is hard to follow, and even blatant attempts to follow in his vein often fail to capture his essence. There’s a lot I could say in this vein, but they tell me that short n’ sweet is what rocks the blogging community, so here’s the short n’ sweet punchline to this entry: Four Brothers is Chandleresque, and I don’t say that lightly.

Once again, you’re stuck with a review that doesn’t fit the mold of what I envisioned for this section. This time, it’s not because it’s too artsy or not genre enough, it’s because the damn thing’s too mainstream. Four Brothers stars Marky-Mark and Andre 3000, and it was released theatrically. But rules were made to be broken, and I’m just a rule-breakin’ mofo, apparently.

Four Brothers is a bad shutyomouth of a movie. It’s become all too infrequent these days to write some witty one-liners and knock some guys around and call it something worth experiencing; the reason Four Brothers succeeds where others fail is that it is seriously good. There’s more to it than the sum of its parts; hell its parts fail, a time or two. There’s some moments in this film where you’ll get annoyed by some contrived scene or another, and wonder why the hell they included that bit of inane plot progression. But those moments are few, and the gist of the film is straight-up Chandler.

Four Brothers is the story of - you guessed it - four brothers, looking for the killer of their mother. They’re all adopted, and they’re a multi-racial set, which is why I dismissed the flick upon hearing about it. Guess what? That’s not the gimmick. That’s too obvious for cats following in the footsteps of one the greatest writers of the 20th century, and so it’s incidental to this movie.

This movie is instead about corruption, and decency, and the ability of a person to make a physical difference in the world. Phillip Marlow wasn’t black or white, he was gangsta. And he was good. And he lived in a world that was evil and wrong and he did his best to stand for what he believed in. That’s what these brothers do, and they do it the same way Marlow did: by taking a simplistic, personal approach to the complexities of life, and doing battle with the forces of darkness one guy at a time.

There are moments in this film where you doubt people; those doubts are sometimes borne out and sometimes turn out to be completely off-base. It always makes sense, and it’s always believable, but it manages to take you by surprise regardless. This, like most stories that strive for what this one does, is about the plot. I don’t, therfore, intend to describe the a-to-b progression that makes up what happens in the flick; watching it go where it goes is a lot of the fun. The first time you read The Big Sleep, you had no idea how it was going to end up, even if you thought you did.

What makes a story is what happens. And that’s where my boy Chandler excels: it’s not predictable; half the time you don’t even know the bad-guy exists until halfway through the story. It’s the journey from ignorance to knowledge, and the painful acceptance of the fact that there’s more misery in the world because of your search for that knowledge that makes a lot of Chandler work. Never is the client happy in the end. In this film, the protagonists - the Marlowes, if you will - are the clients as well, and so by default, they’re not happy campers as things develop.

There’s a passage in of the Chandler books that is often quoted, and I can’t remember which book or where it’s at right now, or I’d quote it myself, but it’s the reason for this review. It says something about how a noble hero’s got to walk these mean streets, and be as dirty as everyone else, but good. Four Brothers captures that. Replace “streets” with “snow” and you’ll totally know which scene I’m talking about. I’d been thinking about Chandler randomly throughout the whole thing, because the way it develops is very much similar to one of his stories, but this one (snowy) moment just captured everything that Marlowe was but could never be so plainly because of his environment.

For the record, like I said, there’s some moments here where you’re just gawking at the ridiculousness. And unlike a Chandler story, where you find out where it’s going as the protagonist does, Four Brothers cuts to scenes of the badguys long before the goodguys have any idea who he is. So this isn’t perfect, and isn’t a rip-off. But if you like the feel of the Marlowe stories, the way they progress, and the way the characters work, you’ll like this film a lot.

In short, I recommend Four Brothers. It’s good. It keeps you involved, it’s got that tension that most movies don’t, where you wonder what’s going to happen, probably more than Chandler ever did; with Marlowe as the narrator, you knew he survived, here you don’t know who’s going to make it out. As an added bonus, the soundtrack is just sweet. There’s mostly seventies tunes here, and they’re all good, and they make me want to cut on the radio.