This Film Can't Juggle

Just watched it and my in-a-nutshell response is that the film throws a lot of balls in the air and just can't juggle them. It's got a family drama, it's got alien ray guns, it's got gangster revenge, it's got world-weary strippers... it just never picks a lane at all.

The writing is pretty bad. The premise is okay, this kid picks up a ray gun, but it never has the characters acting like real people - almost ever. The kid is a bit melancholy, a bit angry, he loves his dad, kinda digs his brother...but I never get the sense of a real kid. His exploration of the gun is weirdly drawn out over many, many scenes and he mostly just pushes buttons and watches it glow and hum. How about a scene where he actually tries it out? Did he even ever use the third setting?

Throughout the film, characters seem to make random decisions. At one point, the two brothers are joined by a stripper. They ask her "Why?" and I still don't know. I don't think she did, either.

There's a twist at the end and it, too, had me just asking far more questions than I had answers to.

Dialogue was awkwardly written, usually sounding perfunctory, and lacked personality, panache, or any sense of real speech patterns or rhythms.

It was mostly a dud, I thought.