You just can’t remake City of God. The kinetic 2002 drama, based on the real do-or-die conditions of a Brazilian favela was a feat of expressive, innovative filmmaking, defining a new cinematic language built from multiple perspectives and hyper-ingenuity. City of Men, a feature spun from the acclaimed four-season Brazilian television show (itself a spin-off of the original film), employs many of the same actors, the editor and composer Antonio Pinto as its predecessor. But what it introduces is a reliance on a clichéd — one could say Hollywood — narrative that replaces humanity with transnational allegory.

Filmed and situated in Dead End Hill, Rio de Janeiro, the “men” are childhood friends — Ace (Douglas Silva) and Wallace (Darlan Cunha) — on the cusp of their 18th birthdays, struggling with the ramifications of adulthood, as both fathers and sons: Wallace shirks his responsibility as the parent of a toddler, while Ace reunites with his deadbeat dad Heraldo (Rodrigo dos Santos), on parole after a 10-year prison sentence for murder. As the Hill degrades into a battleground for drug trafficking, escape is the only option for survival.

City of Men captures the action with the same experimental immediacy in editing and camera work seen in City of God, as we travel from glittering, sweat-covered haunches, to the soft focus of a spider web, to a vista scattered with bullets and bodies. But the beautiful imagery fails to distract you from the fact that City of Men can’t decide if it’s a melodrama about the orphaned sons who become the fathers of same, or a broad examination of the social conditions of Brazilian favelas, with Paulo Morelli’s direction and Elena Soarez’s screenplay turning their young-adult characters into paper-thin archetypes (the determined mother, innocent stooge and charming kingpin). The lead actors are resilient in the wake of a weak script, but it’s unfortunate that Morrelli seems mostly uninterested in fully examining their world.