‘Father Figures’ on HBO: Two Great Scenes Save a Deeply Average Bro-Com

Owen Wilson and Ed Helms play a pair of fraternal twin brothers on a road-trip search for their biological dad, after their mom (Glenn Close) lets it slip that the man she’d always told them was their dad is in fact not. So begins a rather chintzy little odyssey across America, featuring a strange little all-star cast of actors playing the guys’ potential pops, including J.K. Simmons, Christopher Walken, Jack McGee, and, uh, Terry Bradshaw. Playing himself. If this all sounds like a cast-off from the scripts piling on the desks of Adam Sandler or the Farrelly brothers, it does play that way for at least the first hour, if not longer. Helms and Wilson bring with them the memories of their own past bro-coms (The Hangover; Wedding Crashers; even Meet the Parents, which wasn’t exactly a bro-com except when Stiller let his old pal Wilson just sort of riff around for a while), and they have a decent-to-good rapport with one another (even if their complete lack of familial resemblance to one another, much less as twins, will 100% have you prepared for a plot revelation that never comes), but it all just seems like the warmed up leftovers of a genre that’s at an ebb. It’s the kind of movie that has the nerve to open with a prostate-exam joke and then roll its eyes about how played out prostate-exam jokes are.

But you should stick with Father Figures. Past the meta-commentary Terry Bradshaw stuff. Past the parts with J.K. Simmons as a lowlife criminal. Past the cliched quirky-hitchhiker material with Katt Williams. There are two moments in the film that elevate that which have come before it. One involves the Helms character — a milquetoast, divorced proctologist whose teen son hates him — cooling his heels at a hotel bar and striking up a conversation with the woman (Kate Aselton) who sits down next to him. Their conversation is light and flirty and immediately gets the audiences invested in whatever’s going to happen between them. And, unlike nearly every other moment in the movie, the filmmakers don’t immediately undercut it with something silly or gross (okay, not long after, they do, but it ends up working out for the plot anyway). Aselton is an actress you may remember from her roles on The League or Legion; she’s such a welcome presence here, and not just because the movie is drowning in dudes. She’s such a relaxed and funny performer. Helms, who can bring it in the right circumstances, gets on her level, and they both deliver a wonderful moment.

Later on, there’s a fully plot-dictated scene where Glenn Close delivers a monologue explaining the boys’ parental situation at long last. From a distance, it’s merely the straightening out of a loopy and (by this point) aggravating plot situation. But Close, the best actor in this movie by a country mile, really goes somewhere with it. She sells it the way few actresses would be able to. Scoff all you want about Close taking a paycheck role, but whatever they paid her, I guarantee it wasn’t nearly enough.

Not every comedy is a winner, but even the mediocre bro coms, if they can manage to put together two really good scenes, ideally scenes that feature the women who have otherwise too few things to so, then you’ve got yourself a worthwhile Saturday evening HBO watch on your hands.

Where to stream Father Figures