Director Jake Van Wagoner’s debut feature was finished thanks to a Kickstarter campaign (which rather optimistically described the film as “What about Bob? meets Elf“) that focussed on the presence among the small cast of James Murray, “Murr” from the popular television series Impractical Jokers which Van Wagoner had produced for several years. The funders who chipped in to get the film through post-production on the promise of seeing more Murray on the screen must have been bitterly disappointed that he’s barely in it, essentially turning up for a cameo that must have taken all of a day to film.

The Bernard Brothers, Jake (Van Wagoner) and Maclain (Maclain Nelson), grew up as best friends but the deaths of their parents in a traffic accident pouts a strain on their relationship. Matters aren’t made any better by Jake’s frequent disappearances, claiming that he’s traveling through time. Fifteen years later and Maclain is married to Clare (Clare Niederpruem) but is still seeing a therapist (Murray) to help with the trauma that haunts his nightmares. He hasn’t seen Jake for years and seems happy enough with the situation – until Clare decides that with Christmas approaching, they should try to heal the rift. At a remote cabin in the woods, the brothers are reunited – but strange things start to happen and suddenly Jake’s claims to be a time traveller are starting to have a ring of truth about them.

Impractical Jokers is one of the better practical jokes programmes on television, an often genuinely funny show that revels in the many embarrassments heaped upon its four leads. None of that humour is evident here which just goes to show that it’s the talents of the four improv comedians at its core that makes the show what it is. My Brother the Time Traveler (later retitled the more generic Christmas Time) is as tonally inconsistent as it gets. The script, co-written by Van Wagoner and Nelson, tries hard to be funny (and fails), then strives to be taken seriously (and also fails), never getting the balance right at all.

The time travel barely features and is confused and confusing – at one point there should be at least two of Jake running around and there clearly isn’t – as if the writers weren’t quite sure what they were trying to say and do. It suddenly becomes interesting right at the very end (ignore the pointless post-credits scene – it adds nothing), as if the whole sorry affair had been (badly) reverse engineered from this one idea, the story being padded with endless chit chat just to get us to this one big idea.

It wouldn’t be so bad if all the yakking actually amounted to anything, but it doesn’t. This is standard issue sensible brother/idiot brother reconciliation stuff. A story we’ve seen countless times before and it brings nothing new to the party at all. The “comedy” is obvious and forced, the dialogue terrible and the lack of any real story events gets tedious very quickly. Comedy forest rangers (Lisa Clark and Adam Johnson) turn up now and again, there’s an eccentric in a wheelchair (Chris Clark) on hand for some pratfalls and that’s your lot. The back story is imparted via stop-motion title sequence that includes references to yetis and dinosaurs (don’t ask, it doesn’t make any sense) and yetis return in a weird dream sequence involving lightsabres.

It’s all a mess really, an unfunny comedy with a dreary plot and, at best, adequate performances – Niederpruem is the best of the bunch. Murray is only on hand for some low key “marquee value” and proves to be a terrible actor. On Impractical Jokers an amateur film, Damned!, that he had directed and acted in in 1998 (he plays Judas in an alternative telling of the life of Christ) was resurrected to embarrass him and it’s clear that his acting abilities haven’t proved much in the intervening years. The script is so tired and desperate that it reruns the long-running “Murr looks like a ferret” gags from Impractical Jokers but without any of the laughs.

It’s hard to know what to make of a film like My Brother the Time Traveler. It’s clearly a vanity project for Van Wagoner who hasn’t directed again (he went back to television where he was executive producer on comedy improv show Show Offs (2019-) with Nelson one of the performers) and on the strength of this film that’s probably about right. It’s a lifeless affair that’s really just a couple of rungs up from an amateur film. It flaunts its cheapness in every scene, boasts mediocre films crowbarred in for no good reason, has nothing new or particularly meaningful to say and is almost instantly forgettable. It ends with the three most chilling words to adorn any dim-witted no-hoper like this – “to be continued…” Despite the fact that the closing moments are the only really interesting thing about My Brother the Time Traveler, let’s just take the fact that it wasn’t as the best Christmas present we could have hoped for.