96 min | PG-13 | December 4, 2020 | Focus Features
A workaholic Mexican aviation executive learns his estranged American half-brother exists, then gets dragged across the border on a scavenger hunt their dying father designed. The two men hate each other on sight. The movie wants you to believe a road trip fixes that in an afternoon.
Renato Murguia runs a successful aerospace company in Mexico and has buried the abandonment of his childhood under control and routine. A call summons him to Chicago, where his dying father reveals a half-brother Renato never knew. The father leaves behind a scavenger hunt that forces the two men across the country together. Half Brothers wants to be a buddy comedy and an immigration drama at the same time. It commits to neither and pretends the seam between them does not show.
Luis Gerardo Mendez plays Renato as a man whose contempt is a defense mechanism, and he finds real stiffness in the character’s posture and clipped speech. The performance has more going on than the script gives it room to express. Connor Del Rio plays Asher as pure manic irritation, a collection of tics and non-sequiturs aimed at provoking his brother. The two never build a rhythm that makes the eventual reconciliation feel earned. Jose Zuniga carries the flashback scenes as Evaristo, the father whose choices anchor the whole story, and he is the only one asked to play grief instead of shtick.
Luke Greenfield directs from a script by Jason Shuman and Eduardo Cisneros that keeps cutting between a 1990s border-crossing tragedy and a present-day comedy. The editing treats these timelines as equals and lights them identically, so the warm nostalgic glow of the flashbacks bleeds into scenes about desperation and family separation. That visual sameness flattens the serious material into the same register as the jokes. The score underlines every emotional beat with strings, telling the audience how to feel because the scenes cannot do it alone. The film mistakes a manufactured plot device for a story about why people leave their families behind.
The central problem is that Half Brothers uses immigration as a backdrop for a reconciliation it has already decided to grant. The scavenger hunt exists to deliver a twist, and the twist exists to force a hug. Renato’s anger is the most honest thing in the movie, and the film cannot wait to take it away from him. It reaches for the weight of real loss and settles for the shape of it.