Like Father, Like Son

Studio: Lionsgate
Director: Barry Jay

Feb 09, 2025 By Scott Howard Web Exclusive

Barry Jay’s reflection on generational violence delivers an exhausting amount of exposition and wooden performances all around in this movie that’s, well, a movie.

Like Father, Like Son harkens back to the days of roaming the video store and finding something on the shelf you’ve never heard of and taking it home on a boring Sunday afternoon for a chance at finding a hidden gem—and instead finding a rock. Delivering a cringe-inducing plot that occasionally borders on parody, it’s unclear what homage it’s trying to pay but whatever evoked the inexplicably bad dialogue only serves to worsen the experience, devolving into White Male Rage: The Movie. It overstays its welcome after 15 minutes, let alone the full 90-minute runtime.

Like Father, Like Son begins in 1990 on a playground with a father and son, Gabe (Dermot Mulroney) and Eli (Dylan Flashner), preparing to clean the bathrooms for Gabe’s day job as a park custodian. After witnessing a two-dimensional high-school bully assault a helpless victim, Gabe flies into an inexplicable rage, literally beating his opponent to death with a hammer in broad daylight. After Eli witnesses this event and calls the authorities, the audience is treated to a poor voiceover montage reminiscent of an AI text-to-voice bot of Gabe’s trial and subsequent murder conviction, where he is sentenced to death. Darker truths are revealed over angsty teenage dialogue as Eli tries to find out why his father did something so brutal. A now down-on-his-luck Eli quickly spirals into a series of rageful moments, lashing out like a child at random strangers and struggling not to fight his shoddily-written boss while striking up a strange romance with Hailey (Ariel Winter), a fellow troubled youth. The journey takes Eli from back alley to back alley murdering indiscriminately, leading him to boldly remind the audience at every given opportunity, “I’m not like my dad!”

This movie has no actual idea what it wants to be. Is it a character study, a thriller, or a trashy romance? It tries to be all of them at the same time and contorts itself into an amalgam of poorly written films all rolled into one. It assaults the viewer with a razor-thin plot that overindulges in plot armor to prevent its main character from being stopped by the authorities within its first 30 minutes. Every single character in the film is a stereotype. It’s sad to think this could have been a more well-thought-out reflection on generational curses, the trauma passed from parent to child, or at the very least a romantic exploration of two very desperate people finding a home in each other. Unfortunately, there is no redeeming quality to be found before the ‘90s-era school presentation screen cards and credits roll.

Mulroney completely phones it in as sociopathic murderer Gabe, coming off as less threatening and more as just an angry middle-aged man. This is puzzling, as he’s been in a few roles where he at least embodies the character he’s portraying. Flashner depicts Eli with all the charisma of a cardboard cutout. One would consider that the dead eyes and lack of humanity in a killer would benefit their presentation, but this falls woefully short of the mark. Winter’s Hailey appears as some sort of manic pixie dream girl who becomes attached to Eli in a bizarrely short amount of time and breezes right past his waving red flags to start a life with him. Winter seems to do what she can with the role, but her extensive experience in network television does nearly nothing to benefit her here. Mayim Bialik’s and Vivica A. Fox’s appearances as side characters in Eli’s journey both seem to give their all to their respective roles as Eli’s counselor and momentary employer, but there have been cameos with more screen time than them.

Director Barry Jay directs his narrative with an amateur style reminiscent of a high school film fest attempt at a drama. The ’90s grey and brown tones are aesthetically displeasing to look at. Mixing that with the constant use of seizure-inducing flashes of images of faces during moments of violence makes for a distasteful pile-up of some of the worst direct-to-DVD films. Jay presents his characters with few redeeming qualities that bring any sort of emotional payoff for the audience. Ultimately, it will be a challenge to avoid unintentional laughter at the poorly written dialogue and mind-boggling conclusion.

How something like this can be financed in the year 2025 is a mystery that only the producers of the film can explain. Like Father, Like Son can ultimately be summed up by a truly awful bit of filmmaking, as a character has their skull bashed in by a clearly foam cement block that is held aloft as though it’s the real thing. It wants to be something substantive, but the facade just can’t hold up to scrutiny. After a painful experience, the true mercy probably would be not to have watched it at all.

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