Like Father, Like Son

This (thankfully) doesn’t happen too often. The end credits rolled on Like Father, Like Son and I was filled with anger. I’d been angry through its mercifully short, yet somehow still agonizing 89-minute running time. Where the story goes in its dramatic finale is reprehensible. Plenty of reprehensible stuff happens prior to this, but I never expected the movie to stoop so low, even by its own shoddy standards. Writer/director Barry Jay should be ashamed of himself.

Dermot Mulroney plays Gabe, a park custodian who spontaneously murders a teenager he sees bullying a little boy. Gabe is sentenced to death row for his crime. Son Eli (Dylan Flashner) pays him a visit in jail, at the suggestion of his therapist (Mayim Bialik). He promptly disowns his father. Then he sees a guy trying to sexually assault a young woman named Hayley (Ariel Winter), so he intervenes, killing the man in the process. This sets something off in him, and soon Eli is murdering anybody who crosses him the wrong way. He makes a return visit to see Gabe, only to discover that his dad has committed way more murders than previously known.

Like Father, Like Son mistakenly thinks it’s saying something profound about the cycle of violence. In reality, it has nothing of value to say, no genuine psychological insights to offer. The movie is merely a series of scenes where someone makes Eli angry and he responds by murdering them. An abusive parent and a sexually harassing boss are just two of his targets.

The lesser of the problems here is that the film is poorly made in every conceivable way. Flashner is boring, showing no charisma onscreen and delivering his dialogue in a flat manner. The screenplay is shallow. The direction is maddening. Jay overuses the gimmick of flashing. Literally, almost every single scene is interrupted by flashbacks to previous scenes of violence and/or Dermot Mulroney staring angrily at the camera. The director presumably believes he’s conveying Eli’s inner turmoil, but the result exemplifies how little substance his story actually contains.

Then it really goes off the rails, casually and offensively introducing Nazi imagery and having a supporting character make vile racist statements. This comes out of nowhere. You cannot use bigotry of this level for cheap thrills. You must deal with it or leave it out of the story altogether. There is nothing entertaining about the idea of neo-Nazism, and the subject has no place in a movie that only intends to utilize it superficially.

I’m going to drop a spoiler and tell you that Eli murders the Nazi. (Of course he does.) We obviously do not care that this character is murdered, although it highlights the film’s amoral world view. Like Father, Like Son wants us to accept that Eli inherited his violent tendences from Gabe and that they are bad. And yet, everyone he kills “had it coming” in some form. By asking us to have empathy for this guy, I’d argue the movie is glamorizing murder. Each individual Eli kills has done something bad, so he’s essentially turned into an anti-hero, a righter of wrongs. The audience is supposed to be titillated by him slaying terrible people while simultaneously condemning his crimes.

That’s messed up, as is the aforementioned finale. What happens? I’ll simply say it involves putting a young child in extreme jeopardy. Barry Jay is willing to resort to such tactics because he is otherwise incapable of generating suspense. I doubt I’ll see a worse movie in 2025.


Zero stars out of four

Like Father, Like Son is rated R for bloody violence, language throughout, drug use, and some sexual content. The running time is 1 hour and 29 minutes.


© 2025 Mike McGranaghan