As the abundance of Fast & Furious memes have hammered home, you never turn your back on family, even when it involves a violent campaign of revenge that leaves plenty of collateral damage behind.
That was essentially the plot of 2005’s Four Brothers, a fairly popular movie at the time of release that managed to earn $92 million at the box office on a $30 million budget, before going on to enjoy a long-lasting life as a firm favorite among those with a penchant for gritty, street-level crime thrillers.
John Singleton’s familial tale of retribution has now ascended to the upper echelons of the Netflix most-watched list, too, with FlixPatrol revealing that Four Brothers has crashed right into fourth place on the charts in the United States, where it’s provided 109 minutes of hard-hitting entertainment for subscribers across the country.
Garrett Hedlund’s musician, Tyrese Gibson’s former soldier, Mark Wahlberg’s hockey player, and Andre Benjamin’s family man reunite in Detroit when their foster mother is murdered in what appears to be a robbery gone wrong. However, it transpires that Chiwitel Ejiofor’s local crime lord was at the center of the incident, sending the reconnected siblings out to exact retribution.
An 80% user rating on Rotten Tomatoes is substantially higher than the 52% critical score, which makes sense when Four Brothers was clearly designed to appeal to audiences instead of garnering widespread adulation. Tyrese hinted as recently as 2020 that a sequel had been written and was waiting for the all-clear, but until that day does or doesn’t come, Netflix viewers are happy to revisit the first chapter.