Neighborhoods denote classes, streets denote who you are. Man, depending on where you were born, your story is written even before it starts. These are the opening lines of The Twelve Labors, an earnest if naïve addition to the growing canon of Brazilian films taking the struggle of the country’s dark-skinned and lower classed citizens as its subject. Spoken in narration by 18 year-old protagonist Heracles, they prove a pitch-perfect example of the clunky hand with which first-time director Ricardo Elias’ handles the material. Recently released from a jail bid, the troubled but well-meaning Heracles joins his well-to-do cousin at a local courier as a motorcycle delivery boy. Heracles wants to go straight and the film posits his first day on this gig as the penultimate moment of his shot at redemption. As he sets out on errands, haggling with secretaries and wealthy citizens alike, the boy’s mettle is repeatedly tested under a pounding soundtrack and Brazilian sun.

Despite taking the Herculean myth as its inspiration, The Twelve Labors spins a narrative that neither elucidates nor clarifies the lives of its characters nor the world they live in. The aforementioned labors prove pedestrian, rising to the complexity of Heracles learning brotherhood by waiting five minutes with a fallen motorcyclist, or circumventing a snotty secretary by observing a fellow courier stamping his own invoice. Taken on their own, these accomplishments amount to the average kinks of the first day on a job. When wed to Heracles' painfully arched voice-over, however, they are cripplingly trite. Most damning of all is a shameless homage to The 400 Blows in which Mr. Elias ends his film with Heracles journeying a considerable distance to the coast of Brazil, walking out into the rising tide and looking back into the camera just as Antoine Doinel did in Truffaut’s masterwork. It would be one thing if the moment were earned and presented as an allusion to some metaphysical connection between the films’ protagonists, but such is not the case. Coming after so much purposeful intent wielded as a mask for narrative shortcomings, it is but the final in a series of letdowns in a film with a voice incapable of articulating its earnest ambitions.