LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Like Father, Like Son, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 30, 2025

Eli (Dylan Flashner) is worried that he'll become like his father. That's because he witnesses dad brutally murder a teenage boy who was bullying another teen in the opening scene of the ugly and nihilistic Like Father, Like Son. Some of its ideas are repulsive, but it's tough to be offended by the movie. Writer/director Barry Jay's storytelling and filmmaking are incompetent enough to believe most of the movie is just some kind of terrible accident.

In theory, the concept is sound. Eli is a young man with plenty of anger issues, complicated and heightened by his dead-end job and financial insecurity and sexual frustration. Plus, there is the little fact that his father Gabe (Dermot Mulroney) is now on death row, awaiting an execution that seems to be scheduled a month or two after he killed the teen (The prologue is set in the summer of 1990, while the execution date ends up being set for June of the same year, so somebody missed something in the writing, editing, or both here).

Gabe wants to see his son at least one last time before he dies, but understandably, Eli is hesitant. While wrestling with his father's final wish for him, the son becomes increasingly frustrated working for an especially shady life insurance company with an almost comically aggressive (played by Jim Klock), doesn't see much resulting from several sessions with a therapist (played by Mayim Bialik), and is behind on too many bills to count and his rent. Eli keeps getting angrier and angrier, until his life becomes worse and he suggests lashing out in violence.

He does in short order in what will become the single weirdest, most discomforting and most unbelievable element of a movie that almost seems to go out of its way to be all of three of those things in an assortment of ways. Eli goes out on the town and flirts with a young woman named Hayley (Ariel Winter). The two seem to know each other, but it turns out that she's a sex worker. He brings her back to his place, and in the morning, Eli discovers that his wallet is missing. Immediately blaming Hayley, the guy starts to strangle her, until she drops her purse and he finds his wallet in it.

With that act, two plot threads are essentially resolved, or they are theoretically, at least. Is Eli like his father? Obviously, he is, since he nearly kills this woman with relatively minimal prompting. Is this the end of Hayley's character in the movie? Well, it probably should be, except that Jay decides, for reasons that are completely alien to basic story logic and even this movie's own, his tale of a killer-in-the-making needs a romantic subplot.

That's odd enough, but then, there's the way the filmmaker contrives for Hayley to return to the story and to become that romantic partner. Eli sees her again in town and, soon after, saves Hayley from a guy attacking her in an alleyway. He doesn't just rescue her, mind you. He also viciously kills her assailant, so she asks to spend the night at Eli's place and eventually just stays there.

The unintentionally funny thing about the rest of the movie is that Eli genuinely keeps wondering if and fearing that he might become like his father. He continues to do so even after murdering more people, and Jay seems to believe it's a legitimate question for the character and the movie to keep asking until the very end, when even more people are dead by Eli's hands. If almost murdering the woman who somehow becomes his girlfriend wasn't enough of an answer for Eli, the character isn't just a moral vacuum. He's also stupid, which might be a more significant problem for a movie that partly becomes a thriller about the guy trying to get away with all these killings.

The relationship between Eli and Hayley, though, is incredibly off-putting, both in general way and specifically in the way Jay frames it. The two are meant to be sincerely in love, despite what he does to her, that she witnesses one killing, and that she learns about several others as the story progresses. The filmmaker doesn't just do that. He also gives the couple some tender scenes together, with sappy slow-rock music playing on the soundtrack.

The movie's tone is as haphazard as its characterizations and plotting, which is some kind of dementedly notable accomplishment. Like Father, Like Son would easily be a repugnant movie, if not for the ironic saving grace that it seems to be made by people who don't know what they're doing.

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