Any guy stuck at home watching too much TNT on a rainy weekend has seen “The Sons of Katie Elder,” a later and lesser John Wayne horse opera from the 1960s. A Western about four seriously mismatched brothers (Wayne, Dean Martin and Earl Holliman among them) who come together to bury their feisty, flinty mom and punish those who killed her, it’s a pretty good template for any tale of revenge, even one set in a modern day Tombstone – Detroit.

John Singleton and a couple of hired-gun screenwriters have turned that parable about family and firearms into a scruffy, sadistic and yet occasionally entertaining Mark Wahlberg vehicle.

The twist here is that the brothers are even more mismatched. They’re black and white, all troubled kids taken in by the sainted Evelyn Mercer. And as violent as the Old West might have been, it’s got nothing on modern mean streets, where a gun battle can’t even get the interest of lazy or corrupt cops.

Evelyn, played with barely a hint of the halo by Fionnula Flanagan (“The Others”), is still teaching kids important lessons about life and the right road to take when we meet her. Then she’s gunned down in her convenience store.

The Mercer boys reunite for the funeral. Terrence Dashon Howard plays the cop who recites, to his partner, each “boy’s” background in one of the worst-written exposition scenes in recent movie memory.

Bobby (Wahlberg)? An ex-con hockey-addict: “They called him the Michigan Mauler.”

Angel (Tyrese Gibson)? “He was a soldier, a Marine …”

Jeremiah (Andre Benjamin) “used to be big with the unions.”

Jack (Garret Hedlund of “Friday Night Lights”), “a musician.”

The snow has barely covered Mom’s grave before Bobby has a gun out, waving it around in front of a gym full of high school basketball fans – they don’t run screaming; this is, after all, Detroit – dropping informants out of windows and generally spilling the blood he needs to spill to get to the bottom of Mom’s murder.

Angel goes along. Jack does, too, but more reluctantly.

Jeremiah is now a businessman with a Volvo. He doesn’t need this.

And the cops just sort of disappear, until they’re needed to further muddy the waters in a bang-up finale that includes a trek out onto a frozen Great Lake.

The plot is routine, the dialogue poor man’s “Pulp Fiction.” But the movie has the makings of a crowd-pleaser, with a few moments of genuinely offhand and funny-flippant banter blended in with a whole lot of scripted, badly-acted bonhomie.

Bobby’s incessant needling of Jack, the other white “brother,” about his sexual orientation, his labeling of Angel’s old girlfriend (Sofia Vergara) as “La Vida Loca,” brother-on-brother wrestling, teasing, taunting – it’s almost enough to make you ignore how often the screenplay insists that they remind us that they’re “brothers,” as in “You’re my brother,” “I’m just happy to be back with my brothers,” “You got something you wanna tell me, brother?”

The shootouts are vivid, and there’s a cool (if digitally-enhanced) car chase through snow.

But boy, this thing is dumb. And violent.

Any hint that any of the brothers fret over executing those who were mixed up in their mother’s death is merely suggested, then abandoned.

They see Mom’s ghost in her empty place at their Thanksgiving table, still dispensing advice about how to grow up to be decent men. And they ignore every single thing she taught them. Bobby beats one guy to death, and beyond, with a brick.

In “The Sons of Katie Elder,” that’s the way the “boys” were raised – to be frontier-tough, to be willing to avenge for the sake of justice. Detroit may be the movies’ idea of today’s lawless frontier. These Mercer boys were supposedly raised better than this, but they learned more from punk Bobby than from Evelyn.

Which is easy to do, considering Wahlberg’s charisma. Hedlund has no “moments,” Gibson doesn’t do much with the ones he’s given, and Andre Benjamin can’t hide from his Outkast pop-star past. He has the meatiest part, and he isn’t up to it. Only rising-star Howard, in one cop-confrontation scene, shows anything like acting in this.

But then, we didn’t get any Oscar moments from Dino, the Duke and Earl Holliman way back when, did we? As long as the action snaps and the violence feels (somewhat) righteous, there’ll always be a place for movies like “Four Brothers” – on rainy Saturdays, on TNT.