nobody would ever say it's easy to successfully pull off a comedy drama
but unfortunately i don't think the 2020 film half brothers has done a very good job with
this i didn't hate the film but there are a lot of things about this that i thought
were poor decisions that could have been done a lot better this is directed by luke greenfield
and stars louis gerardo mendes renato and cardinal rio is usher and i'll read the description from my
mdb i'll talk around it i'm not going to give any spoilers but i don't think i'm going to recommend
it unless there's something specific about this that draws you in otherwise i wouldn't
really bother with it so the description is as follows renato a mexican aviation exec is
shocked to learn he has an american half-brother he never knew about the free-spirited usher they
are forced on a road trip together tracing the path their father took from mexico to the u.s
so when renato was a young boy his father had to leave him because there were no jobs and he went
off of course to find jobs in the u.s while there he spawned another child this half-brother who
visually is the polar opposite renato is kind of a bit more suave looking he you know slightly
darker skin very dark hair um asher is kind of pasty white with very auburn hair visually they
don't look anything alike which adds a comedic element when you have to remember that these are
half brothers from the same father one of them of course growing up in america there's one in mexico
um because he realizes i apologize if you heard my phone there renato is very racist
towards americans it's very bizarre and i'm not saying that everything he says is incorrect
but he's very nasty about americans and i don't know why the film got away with that whereas if
the tables were turned and asher was saying all of these horrible stereotypes about mexicans
wouldn't wouldn't really go down the same way so i think you know it's not very um balanced
with that regard they do go on this road trip to try and um well they have to deliver something
and that takes them on this journey that their father would have taken from the mix from mexico
to the us and on route they get into all kinds of bother and meet people who knew their father
and they spent time together slightly bonding but largely renato just being
annoyed at everything in the world i really hate renato apart from the whole racism aspect
he is just outright selfish there's a scene in the beginning it's not really a spoiler
but he threatens to buy all of the donuts in this coffee shop and then throw them in the bin
i thought yeah buy them so other people can't have them if you're trying to be selfish
but don't waste food you're just an arrogant word i can't say on youtube i hated him from the word
go and because of that i hated him throughout the entire film because it's you know first
impressions um count but also he was very true to his own personality all the way throughout of it
yes he had some character development but for the most part i really couldn't stand him at all usher
is not exactly likable on the other hand i found him very obnoxious and annoying but nowhere near
as much as renato so the first issue i have is with the character writing you have to be able to
like the characters to have an emotional interest in their journey i didn't find it any i didn't
find it funny at all i found the scene with the goat very bizarre um a little cute very very cute
and the mystery element of it you know as the unravel things on the journey
i thought it was interesting but it may be a little historically interesting but for
the narrative i just i wasn't hooked i didn't care where they were going
i didn't care what the final outcome would be mostly because i didn't care about the characters
i could not have cared less about them did i care that they bonded as half brothers not even a
little bit the other thing i think was a very bad decision um though i understand why they did it
but some of the time certainly near the beginning renato is talking in spanish and then he'll switch
back to english when he's talking to somebody else and it goes back and forth and it just means
that you have to constantly go back and forth between subtitles and non-subtitles unless of
course you're a spanish speaker i am not and i i love foreign language films with subtitles but not
when it's a mix in the same film i find it really jarring and uncomfortable but thankfully that
didn't last the whole film it took 45 minutes for me to actually start to enjoy this i persevered
because i was hoping it was going to be good but it took 45 or 50 minutes i can't remember exactly
for me to finally think oh actually maybe this is all right but quickly that changed
and i started not liking it again the narrative is very poorly written the characters are even worse
the technical aspects you know the way it's shot the sound effects the music
the acting all of that is good but from a narrative perspective and from
me judging it as a writer is quite weak and has kind of let itself down