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Clive Owen and Billy Crudup play bolshy brothers in Blood Ties, a boisterous portrait of fraternal rivalry that reduces every festive family gathering to a scene-chewing crime scene. At Thanksgiving they lock antlers in the lounge, knocking their doddery dad (James Caan) into the coffee-table. Christmas dinner is interrupted when the cops pile in. We never get to see how the brothers celebrate the coming of spring, although it is unlikely to involve an Easter egg hunt.
Set down in a 1970s Brooklyn of firearms and flares, facial hair and Fonzy posing, Blood Ties is actually the English-language debut of the French director Guillaume Canet who scored a break-out hit with 2007's Tell No One. As such, it arrives in Cannes with a mongrel pedigree, awash with French money and lacing the melting-pot with various French and British performers. At times, it seems, even the accents are at war in Canet's new film.

Crudup stars as Franck, his moustache twitching like an anxious ferret as he strains to rein in bad-apple Chris (Owen), who's out of jail and kicking up sparks. Franck longs to reconnect with his ex-girlfriend (Zoe Saldana) and has handily cleared away the competition by sticking her husband (Matthias Schoenaerts) behind bars. Chris, meantime, truly wants to go straight. But his dreams of running a refreshment stand come to nothing and the bad old life is constantly calling.

From here, it's a lumbering, thunderous journey towards the final showdown, as Canet drapes his tale in tatty 70s fashions and leans hard on a soundtrack that is so endearingly literal it practically digs us in the ribs. He plays Do What You Gotta Do when the brothers are fighting and Money, Money, Money when the cash's rolling in. Elsewhere, Marion Cotillard's beautiful junkie prostitute shows up in slow-motion to the squalling sounds of Lee Moses's Bad Girl – just as a hint that she is not to be trusted.

I'm not convinced that this hoary, hackneyed old cop-opera is entirely to be trusted either, although it is served with such relish that the fun proves infectious. The programmers, it turns out, have timed the picture to perfection, dropping it into an out-of-competition slot just as the festival completes its first lap. By this point we have been treated to so much social-realist roughage, spicy avant-garde and delicately flavoured drama that a little high-end junk-food almost comes as a relief. Blood Ties is Cannes' equivalent of a hamburger – pink in the middle with French dressing on the side. Inside the screening room, the delegates wolfed it down and then belched their approval.