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Nobel Son is like lots of other movies; it does some things well, and it doesn’t do other things well. The difference between Nobel Son and other movies is that while it does what it does well extremely well at times, what it doesn’t do well, it does horribly. Does that sentence seem confusing? Hell yes it does. And welcome to Nobel Son.

The best part of the movie is the cast. It’s a movie that has a strong amount of role-playing actors including Alan Rickman playing Eli Michaelson in the movie as pretty much the world’s biggest A-hole to ever win the Nobel Prize. Bill Pullman plays a detective, Mary Steenburgen is great here as she always is as the wife, Sarah, of Eli Michaelson and the mother of our main character Barkley, played by Bryan Greenberg. Greenberg is actually a very strong lead character of this movie. He does a great job being a very complex character in Barkley and he is the dominant actor in every scene that he’s in. The cast is fine, and honestly everything else with the movie is fine; script, direction, everything. Everything except identity.

Why does art have to have an identity? It doesn’t, but when a film is trying to be a comedy of any kind, it needs to have one. Even if it’s a dark comedy like this one tries to be, or at least you think that it tries to be. Truth be told, the laughs in this movie are few and far between. And where you think you’re supposed to laugh, you’re not entirely sure you’re supposed to.  The only real laughs you get with this movie is when Rickman is being a total a-hole or when Barkley is talking about how big of an a-hole his father is. After that, everything else is too tense to be funny and too funny to be tense. It generally just doesn’t make any sense.

Nobel Son is a tough call. It’s hard to tell whether it was taken too serious or not serious enough. It’s hard to tell whether it’s a comedy or a suspense movie, and it’s hard to tell whether it’s a good movie or not. On first glance there are big glaring holes in the overall product, but on second glance you think they might be there on purpose. Not a bad movie but a movie that pulls itself and the person watching it in too many directions.