In the unapologetically melodramatic “Illegal Tender,” a Latino family copes with the original sin behind their comfortable suburban life. Franc. Reyes’s double-barreled direction is dedicated to leaving no emotion unannounced as Wilson (Rick Gonzalez), a sensitive college student, confronts his widowed mother, Millie (Wanda De Jesus), about their ill-gotten gains. The earnestness suits the impassioned themes of pride and legacy, but most of the movie comes off as overheated and half-shouted at the viewer.

In the prologue set in the bad old Bronx days, decent drug-dealer Dad (Manny Perez) is betrayed and murdered while his wife is in the hospital giving birth to their son. She flees with her child and her husband’s money-laundered assets, and we flash forward a couple of decades to a new world: roomy Connecticut digs and a luxe car for college-age Wilson, who, in a neat touch, idly plays hip-hop about ’80s ghettohood. Millie has an adorable second son, whom Wilson dotes on when he’s not with his steady girlfriend Ana (Dania Ramirez) from school.

Wilson never thinks to ask why his formidable mother never works, but the past erupts when she suddenly insists they pull up stakes (which, as ample exposition explains, has happened before). A chance supermarket encounter with an old face from the Bronx convinces Millie that her husband’s old enemies will soon find them, but Wilson resists leaving.

So, with the unblinking soap opera intensity that is Ms. De Jesus’s primary register in the film, she tells Wilson everything while hauling out mean-looking guns from a basement locker. To Mr. Reyes’s credit, when two assassins finally arrive as Wilson is having pizza with Ana, the absurdity of his getting thrust into warriorhood is acknowledged. His hands shake as he grips two guns, while she clutches butcher knives and babbles.

But even for a character made untouchable by dint of his right to confront the past, Wilson’s subsequent journey to Puerto Rico to meet his father’s nemesis, Javier (Gary Perez), turns facile. Shuttled around by a chatty cabbie who keeps reappearing, Wilson fearlessly finagles his way into the big man’s dance club and gains the favor of a middleman named Choco (reggaeton star Tego Calderón, suave to the point of mumbling). Javier has Wilson beaten up at first, but eventually even he slaps his heart onto his sleeve like everyone else.

The B-movie directness (which, in the case of Ms. De Jesus’s maternal bossiness, has a touch of Pam Grier) does get at the meat of the family’s dynamics of respect and tough love, and there are interesting moments in which crime drama conventions are discarded for moments of sincere reaction. But scenes and dialogue spill over with a hysterical self-seriousness, and Mr. Reyes’s filmmaking is notably ragged when he’s not showing sexy glimpses of the criminal high life.

As resilient as its characters may be, “Illegal Tender” isn’t the sort of movie that stands up under much pressure, and that’s especially true about the family’s secret. Millie’s defense of her dead husband as “a good person who made bad choices” testifies to her faithfulness to his best intentions and his love for his family, but she doesn’t have to claim, as she does, that everyone with some worldly success bears some “stains.” (Hilariously, the movie makes a point of saying that Millie didn’t just launder her husband’s filthy lucre, but “made some smart choices” — by investing in Microsoft.)

John Singleton is credited as producer for “Illegal Tender,” and you can see why the director of the 1991 inner-city tragedy “Boyz n the Hood” would be interested in this film’s head-on style and its suburban protagonist, purged of his family’s past much as his mother has laundered the family’s fortune. But Mr. Reyes could use some ambiguity, as well as a better control of the mechanics of melodrama, to master his film’s thorny premise.