Even the two leads seem confused about what kind of movie they’re in. Helms, playing a depressed, divorced father and a gastroenterologist, acts like he’s in a cloudy Sundance indie, but is unable to make himself an interesting leading man despite his desperation to know the identity of his father. He’s accompanied by Wilson, whose first line in the movie is “life is so crazy,” and whose wide-eyed behaviors are not dissimilar to the type of work he got in 2006 after “You, Me and Dupree” opened.
“Father Figures” portrays these guys as pathetic (Helms’ Peter) and/or irritating (Wilson’s Kyle), and their on-screen mother Helen (Glenn Close) brings no love to the proceedings. For decades, Peter and Kyle have thought that their father was dead—but when Peter thinks he saw their father in an episode of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” Helen reveals (on her wedding day to Harry Shearer’s Gene) that their father is Terry Bradshaw. That proves out to not be the case, as the floating-head photoshopped poster will indicate, but the brothers follow a very thin thread as various men (Bradshaw, Ving Rhames, J.K. Simmons) then try to remember when they could have slept with Helen during the Studio 54 days of the 1970s. June Squibb briefly swears in a way that's kind of funny, and Katie Aselton is given a thankless love interest role. The only true spark in this “anyone can write comedy” script is in a twist at the end, but it seems to work in part because the story wears you down with its simple, tedious quest for two hours.
“Father Figures” is the latest textbook in how to make a lazy Hollywood comedy, placed slightly higher than theatrically-released Adam Sandler movies and “A Bad Mom’s Christmas” because it doesn’t always look like it takes place inside a commercial. “Father Figures” is filled with the type of stale-yet-crowd-approved bits with which weak comedies kill time: abruptly raunchy elderly people, jokes about people who are special needs, clownish Boston accents, and even an African-American character (Katt Williams) who is later treated like magic. When physical comedy is involved, with people getting abruptly hit, sucker punch brawls and someone getting shot with a tranquilizer dart, “Father Figures” aims for cheap shock laughs.
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