Country: USA (1965)
Director: Henry Hathaway
Starring: John Wayne, Dean Martin

Country: USA (2005)
Director: John Singleton
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese Gibson

Review by: Charlie
Rating: 3 out of 4 stars (for both films)

Four Brothers, the recent big budget release from Paramount, is a loose remake of the old western The Sons of Katie Elder, starring John Wayne and Dean Martin. The remake is set in a tough Detroit neighborhood, and the plot arcs differ somewhat, but the story is more or less the same. Before the start of the film, a mother dies, and when her four notorious trouble-making sons come home for the funeral, they stumble upon a darker plot which they’re determined to uncover. Although much of the nuance is removed, I actually liked the remake quite a bit. Even more so than the original, it’s an unapologetic revenge film, and little time is spent agonizing over the question of whether revenge is a bad thing. Certainly the remake has a much faster pace than the original and a lot more violence. In my mind the closest comparisons are maybe Collateral and The Recruit – these films are not re-writing the face of cinema, but they’re above average actioners and well-worth watching.

The Sons of Katie Elder goes something like this (spoilers ahead): John Wayne, Dean Martin and two other brothers return home for their mom’s funeral – her heart just gave out a mere 6 months after the death of her husband. Two things stick out for the brothers – one, dad was murdered (shot in the back) and nobody seems to want to talk about what happened. Two, mom somehow lost the ranch and was broke when she died. And they can’t help but notice that the town thinks the brothers are scum, and should be run out of town, both because of their past deeds and because they weren’t there to help their mother. John Wayne, an infamous gunfighter and the most notorious of the brothers, leads the way to finding out what really happened, and punishing those responsible. Dean Martin, a professional card player and hustler, goes along with it but periodically considers bolting to save his skin. The youngest son was the hope of the family – he went off to college and would have been the only one to make something of himself, but he needs some coaxing because what he really wants is to quit and be a gunfighter like John Wayne. The black hat in this film is Morgan Hastings – he owns a gun shop, runs gambling in the town, with the help of his son, who is played by Dennis Hopper, and is the current owner of the Elder ranch. Hastings claims that Mr. Elder got drunk and gambled the property away at blackjack, which we might have been able to confirm if Mr. Elder hadn’t been shot that night in the back. The brothers are slow in finding everything out, and as things start to go wrong in town, the brothers get blamed. They’re nearly hung by a lynch mob, shot by an eager and “conscientious” deputy, and murdered by bandits. On this path, they also try to find their way to redemption in the eyes of the town’s decent folk and to make their mom proud by ensuring the youngest continues his college studies.

Four Brothers follows a similar path. This time we get to see the mother just before she dies, and she doesn’t die out of heartbreak about her dead husband, but rather is killed in a convenience store robbery in Detroit. The brothers return home for the funeral (and, like in The Sons of Katie Elder, one is not present at the funeral). They were all adopted by the saint of the neighborhood (which explains why 2 are white and two are black) – she had placed many kids in foster homes, but took the four most difficult kids in when nobody else would have them. Mark Wahlberg is the John Wayne character here – he’s the toughest of the bunch and makes the decisions. This time the clues come in more piece-by-piece. At first it just looks like getting revenge simply means getting the robbers of the store, but when the facts stop adding up, a larger plot starts to reveal itself involving the largest gang in town, a city council member, a dirty cop and a land development project that one of the brothers went for broke trying to get the rights to develop. Wahlberg moves the investigation along with audacious stunts that force information to surface, but these stunts also bring the gang’s heat down on them. Again the brothers are determined to get revenge for their mother’s death while (to a lesser extent than in the original) trying to redeem their own names in the process.

So how does the remake stack up? A lot better than I had anticipated. The acting in it is solid, and Mark Wahlberg as an inner-city tough guy works well enough (though he has a way to go to be the John Wayne of today). The remake also shakes itself free of some of the baggage that came with the western. This is Detroit, not a small town, and certainly not everybody knows their names and reputations. As a result, much less time is spent on the town’s reaction, although a gesture towards this is made — in the remake the police start the film with a brother-by-brother rundown of their notorious records, and throughout the film the police emphasize the brothers’ last name (”He’s a Mercer alright”) just as is done in the original western (”He’s an Elder, ain’t he?”). But it’s hard to imagine how the role of the town as a collective judge of the way they’ve led their lives would work here, as it does in so many westerns. What would be the equivalent of a town-wide lynch mob in Detroit? So I think it was smart to downplay that aspect of the original. It also speeds the plot along nicely. This is in contrast with The Sons of Katie Elder, where the frame-up arrest and looming threat of the lynch mob outside the town jail slows the film down in the third act. In Four Brothers, the pace of the film never experiences a this kind of lull.

One potential criticism that I would float of the remake is that it oversimplifies everything. The mother isn’t just any mother, she’s a saint – she adopted the worst kids in town when nobody else would take them in and had devoted her life to helping kids find foster homes. I think it’s more powerful in the original where the mother is simply a mother — could be anyone’s mother — and the audience can struggle that much more with the question “what would I do if it were my mother?”

The bad guy in the film is also a cartoonishly evil person, and several scenes that develop his personality do little to humanize him. In contrast, the villain in The Sons of Katie Elder is shown trying to explain away his actions to his son, who resists him. That villain is still bad to the bone, but at least we know he’s thinking about what he’s doing, which makes him more 3-dimensional. In fairness, there are also points where the original had cartoonish moments that are kept out of the remake (the hired gun in particular is a cartoon of a character if there ever was one, and he has no equivalent in Four Brothers) but I’m not sure that amplifying the stakes with the adoption story really helped make the remake a more compelling story.

Other than that criticism, I give it a big thumbs up. And if you’ve seen both films, the similarities are fun to track. In both films, the center of the conflict is over a piece of land. In both films, the fact that the mother would not want revenge is simply ignored by the brothers, who will deal with the offense in their own way. The major ambush/shootout in the western (while the brothers are being transported to Laredo) corresponds nicely with the mob’s assault on the family home in Four Brothers, including (big spoiler this sentence……………..) the death, in each film, of one of the brothers in this scene.

It’s also fun tracking the differences between the two films (spoilers ahead). The sheriff’s deputy in the western is not outright corrupt, as is the police partner in Four Brothers. The deputy goes through his own short-lived character arc from an over-zealous attitude that the Elders are scum, to a more stoic attitude that as a lawman it’s not for him to pre-judge the suspects. In the remake, a fake-out in the second act implies that maybe one of the brothers was involved in plotting against the mother, but then proves to be a dead-end. No such nefarious inference takes place in the western. On the other hand, in the western, the brothers end up in jail in large part because Dean Martin’s character ran away from a murder charge, leading to a redemptive decision by John Wayne that they’re “not going to run away this time.” Also, the angle of banding together to send the youngest to school, in honor of the mother’s wishes, falls away in the remake, although smaller references to doing things that their mother had wanted come up in Four Brothers (her telling them to chew with their mouths closed etc.). Certainly the inevitable twist-ending in the remake has no comparison to the “this was inevitable” showdown at the end of the western. Perhaps the most obvious distinction between the two is the level of violence. John Singleton (Boyz n the Hood, Higher Learning) is not known for papering over such scenes, and they are front and center in this picture. The violence is on over-drive in the remake. And it’s not just the violence, but the attitude towards violence in the remake that is noteworthy. In The Sons of Katie Elder, John Wayne struggles a bit with what’s the right thing to do, and we get a few earfuls of argument why he should just leave town and leave his gun — mostly from a local lady who took care of their mother. Such moralizing had next to no role in the remake. It is an unabashed revenge film, which is by itself a bit surprising in today’s climate.

My guess is most people will like the movie, unless the violence is prohibitive, which is possible. The remake is a fresh take on a good western, with solid acting, solid action, and a pace that actually out-does the original. The Sons of Katie Elder is probably a more subtle film, telling the story of anybody’s mother, rather than the saint of the neighborhood, but also lets its reflective moments trip up the film’s pace from time to time. And the inevitable twist ending in Four Brothers, while very Hollywood, is quite enjoyable. The remake is undoubtedly a darker tale, less about redemption than straight-up revenge, but as far as the touchy subject of remakes of classic westerns go, Four Brothers scores high and is well worth a watch.

© Charlie Prince