Half Brothers (2020)

(On Cable TV, September 2021) Like many films of its ilk, Half Brothers seems torn between two movies and falters by trying to have it all. In one moment, it tries to become a semi-serious film about a dead father with two families, two sons who don’t know about each other, and a state-wide treasure hunt meant to tell them the truth about him. At other times, it tries to be a silly comedy with two men getting into scrapes and getting out of them through sheer chutzpah. The mixture doesn’t always take. I suppose that one of the biggest stumbling blocks to Half Brothers’ success is a premise so fantastically unlikely (a devoted Mexican father travelling to the United States to make money, but somehow never coming back and instead starting a new family stateside, and neither mom nor first son knowing about it) that it doesn’t inspire confidence in the rest of the film’s ideas. There are plenty of other rough plotting spots in the result — the treasure hunt conceit alone is predicated on a series of unlikely actions spanning years of preparation, and the more preposterousness the film piles upon itself, the less credible it is. (The goat thing is, well, the goat thing: unexplainable and useless.)  But there’s worse—the back-and-forth between dumb comedy and heartfelt statement on borders and disunited families is not always well-mastered. By the time the film makes parallels between US immigration policy and the plight of its characters (without a passport, you’re going to be treated along racial lines), it’s hard to miss the point, but also hard to avoid thinking that it could have been better. At least the lead actors make it just a bit better: Luis Gerardo Méndez is good as the responsible Mexican brother, while Connor Del Rio is annoying but not exasperating as the wilder American brother. Half Brothers is certainly watchable, but it can’t quite navigate the valley between the spectacular and the credible.