A flagrantly contrived piece of Hollywood-style hokum masquerading as serious drama, Rudo y Cursi gets the producing careers of the “three amigos” – Mexican directors Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñarritu and Guillermo del Toro, working under the banner “Cha Cha Cha” – off to a very inauspicious start. Written and directed by Cuarón’s younger brother Carlos, who co-wrote Y Tu Mamá También and who reunites that hit’s two headliners, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, for his behind-the-camera debut, the film attempts to mask its story’s creakiness with local flavor, exhibiting a comfortable, intimate familiarity with both its rural Mexico and Mexico City settings. Anyone who’s seen a cautionary tale about the dangers of fame and fortune, however, will likely groan their way through this saga about two banana-harvesting brothers, Luna’s hard-headed Beto, nicknamed “Rudo” (i.e. “tough), and Bernal’s wannabe singer Tato, aka “Cursi ” (i.e. “corny”), who both discover the pleasures and perils of having their superstardom dreams come true after they fortuitously meet, and then are signed to athletic contracts by, soccer agent Batuta (Guillermo Francella).

Cuarón’s relaxed, unhurried direction creates a convivial atmosphere, even if his conspicuous avoidance of showing actual game footage (instead, only depicting on-field incidents during stoppages in play) seems curious given the material’s passionate interest in the sport. And boy oh boy, is it ever interested, as evidenced by the clog-your-ears-incessant narration by Batuta, which is so rife with soccer metaphors (sample: “Loving a woman and a ball is the same”) that one comes to think Cuarón must be subtly mocking the entire notion of narration. Alas, he’s not, since when Batuta isn’t comparing his beloved pastime to life, he’s simply offering up overcooked stand-alone platitudes (“Pity, nowadays games are mistaken for wars and wars for games”) in an effort to spell out every single obvious point Rudo y Cursi has already, or is about to, make. Batuto’s verbal diarrhea epitomizes tell-don’t-show storytelling and Cuarón never lets up, piling on endless third-person blather in an apparent effort to give his storybook parable some profundity. Instead, however, it merely serves as insult to injury, rubbing in our faces the fact that, for all its attention to crafting a realistic sense of time and place, the film is the type of formulaic careful-what-you-wish-for jibber-jabber that domestic cinema has been churning out, to generally awful results, for decades.

Bernal and Luna’s collaborative history lends a modicum of weight to their depiction of squabbling, yet devoted, brothers. Still, although they attempt to downplay their characters’ schematic relationship, Cuarón’s script puts them through such hackneyed paces that any glimmers of authenticity found in their performances are overwhelmed by the narrative’s excessively melodramatic developments. Cursi becomes a soccer superstar but squanders his potential by pursuing a misguided music career and shacking up with a stunning gold-digger TV celeb. Rudo chases a soccer-goalie record but puts his life in jeopardy by gambling himself into deep debt. The two, having first embarked on their pro athlete paths thanks to a single penalty kick in which Rudo’s instructions to Cursi were misinterpreted, eventually wend their way to another monumental penalty kick at film’s conclusion, their personal and professional futures once again hinging on their ability to effectively communicate. They’re plot developments straight out of an Afterschool Special, yet treated by Cuarón with an undeserved level of self-satisfied import, the director oblivious to the fact that just as his protagonists don’t quite know “right” from “left,” his film doesn’t know novelty from banal clichés.