A dingy, lowbrow farce dressed in tattered genre rags, Belgian director Dominique Deruddere's Hombres Complicados has the appealing look of an Aki Kaurismaki road comedy, but too often mistakes hysterical for hysterically funny. Dirk Roofthooft and Jos De Pauw are estranged brothers reunited by their mother's death. Roofthooft, an obnoxious two-bit hoodlum with crippling mob debts, ropes straitlaced customs officer De Pauw into taking a family vacation to resolve their differences. Of course, he fails to mention the slack-jawed goons hired to trail them and kill them unless he schemes to raise some quick cash. With that premise in place, Deruddere and Marc Didden's script all but writes itself, as the siblings grudgingly come to accept each other and the plot ambles down a well-worn path. Roofhooft's grating, second-rate James Woods routine overwhelms the more agreeably understated De Pauw, stifling whatever point Deruddere was trying to make about the importance of family ties. Hombres Complicados throws a few interesting wrinkles into the mix, including a sweet and unlikely love affair between the brothers' wives and some effectively quirky deadpan moments, but it never tweaks road or gangster genre conventions in any memorable new directions.