Too much time spent trying to be meaningful

The jokes, energy and plot all land softly in Father Figures — which wouldn’t be a problem if this weren’t a Hollywood movie that requires formulaic high stakes. The film spends too much time trying to be as meaningful with its comedy as it is raunchy.

Peter (Ed Helms) is a depressed divorcee more interested in watching Law & Order reruns than spending time with his son. His fraternal twin Kyle (Owen Wilson) gets a parental version of cold feet when he finds out his Hawaiian girlfriend is pregnant. The two go on a fatherfinding journey when their mother Helen (Glenn Close) reveals that their father didn’t die from cancer when they were tots, but is actually Terry Bradshaw (played by the footballer himself). Or is it Roland Hunt (J.K. Simmons), a Wall-Street broker wash-up now resorting to petty theft to make a living? Or perhaps it’s Dr. Tinkler (Christopher Walken), their hometown veterinarian.

It turns out their mom was having a lot of sex before she was their mom. (“It was the 70s!” becomes the justifying refrain.) As the twins go from one end of the country to the other to find their estranged father they learn certain emotional truths about fatherhood, and brotherhood, too.

Father Figures tries to hard to add a layer of meaning to its comedy. But more often than not, the jokes are at the expense of Helen, whose gifts in the bedroom are described in detail to Kyle and Peter by the numerous men she slept with, just before the brothers can reveal that she’s their mom. It’s a joke that writer Justin Malen and director Lawrence Sher don’t believe gets old, but it does.

Sher has worked as a cinematographer on comedies like The Hangover and Dan in Real Life, but perhaps he was too busy directing to worry about his first craft, as Father Figures is surprisingly boring to look at. In fact, everything about the movie is low-key: the humour, dialogue, energy and direction. Spectacular scenes — like a near railroad car crash and the brothers’ fight with some Irish lads — become tonally off-kilter for a movie largely based on the most banal kind of fraternal tension.

Jokes are so scarce that Wilson and Helms are forced to simply react to each other, difficult given their superficial character arcs. Peter is a doctor who specializes in colon cancer, so cue a buttload of butt jokes, and Kyle is a beach bum who lucked into becoming the brand image of a barbecue sauce. His laid-back charisma irritates the anal-retentive Peter, still upset at his brother for having more sex than him when they were teenagers.

Father Figures unintentionally proves that having good male role models is necessary because otherwise men become jerks jealous of each other’s sexual scores and financial status. The film amounts to the predictable kind of output from middle-aged dudes whose sense of humour is anchored to objectifying the sexual appetites of women.