The titular quartet, all adopted, all acknowledged "fuck-ups," are of two races, evenly divided, black and white, and reunited for the Turkey Day funeral of their sainted mother, murdered in the course of a liquor-store holdup. "I didn't come back here for the funeral," explains the Mark Wahlberg one, making clear right off the bat that this is to be a tale of revenge, a pursuit undertaken with a singular lack of strategy and diplomacy. (Key investigative tools: a gallon of gasoline and a cigarette lighter.) The Detroit setting opens the skies to a storm of Motown -- Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, The Four Tops -- and the time of year opens them additionally to as much snow as in the relocated remake of Assault on Precinct 13, even to the point of engulfing the white-crowned Paramount mountain in the opening logo. Major assets, let's count them, are multiple: unselfconscious and unselfcongratulatory racial togetherness (to get the redeeming social merit out of the way first); a hurtling pace, albeit a bit lurching, leaping, and bumping; crisp photography; tangy dialogue ("You don't pay a whore to fuck you. You pay her to leave"); hellacious action, slickly staged by director John Singleton, most particularly the siege of the family home by ski-masked machine gunners, a sort of pocket edition of the aforementioned Assault on Precinct 13; and a vigorous villain, played against type by Chiwetel Ejiofor (the sweetly sympathetic figure of Dirty Pretty Things and Melinda and Melinda, every bit as sharp a turnaround as Jeffrey Wright's villain in Singleton's Shaft), who acquits himself well in the climactic mano-a-mano on the ice, bouncing on his toes in the float-like-a-butterfly style of Muhammad Ali. Bully he may be; chicken he isn't. On the other side of the scales, causing momentary teeters here and there, would be the air of utter unreality, such that the cops will be content to cart away the bodies in the street without even checking to see the survivors' gun permits. "Self-defense" is the on-the-spot assessment, a ruling in compliance with the hurtling pace. Tyrese Gibson, André Benjamin, Garrett Hedlund. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd