Illegal Tender

A naïve college boy realizes that life in suburbia isn’t all sweater vests and sweethearts when his American Dream mom suddenly becomes a pistol-packing matriarch. After 20 years on the lam, the mom’s sordid and convoluted past involving the thugs who killed her husband unsurprisingly catches up to her. The only surprise is that it took two entire decades to be discovered, when she was only several hundred miles away and using the same last name. Logic aside, the son gets a crash course on reality and graduates with a degree in manhood to help his mother escape from a life he knew nothing about. Writer/director Franc. Reyes’ heavy-handed screenplay offers up unauthentic, one-sided characters and a meandering plot, and the whole thing comes off like an amateur telenovela.