Movies like “Crypto Boy” remind us that no matter how current and “hot” the topic, the label “melodramatic” will never go out of style.

Melodramas use exaggerated tropes for plots and lean on character “types” so familiar that the entire enterprise feels comfortably familiar to the point where it’s predictable, beginning to end.

A “virtuous” hero or protagonist faces forces of corruption and is tested and tainted before triumphing over the cynical, the greedy and the venal. Sentiment turns into sentimentality and everybody learns “family” is what matters and life offers no “shortcuts” to happiness.

“Crypto Boy” is about a son of a struggling immigrant who stumbles into a short cut that will solve all their problems. He will be tempted and tested, betray those he loves and be gullibly tricked by those he’s just met. All for a currency and business model that’s been labeled “a Ponzi scheme” so often it should be on the prospectus you’re pitched when you consider investing.

Amir (Shahine El-Hamus) is a Dutch son of an Egyptian immigrant. He’s 20 years old, with friends and a steady job he loathes — making deliveries for his father Omar’s (Sabri Saad El-Hamus) “authentic Mexican” restaurant in Amsterdam.

That’s a dead end, and Amir knows it. The business Dad started still struggles, as he’s still feeding the neighbors as “family” for their many evening soccer-watching parties.

Amir has no education and no money and no prospect for bettering his lot.

But fate has him make a delivery at an office tower where the charismatic Roy Warner (Minne Koole) is preaching to his staff, possible investors and other believers.

“Don’t work for money. Let money work for YOU!” Figure it out, folks. “Hard work is taxed. Wealth ISN’T.”

Fate and coincidence, major elements of melodramas, intervene again when Amir tries to hustle up a job at Warner’s CryCore Capital. An old friend from the ‘hood, a rapper and influencer, is dodging a meeting with Roy. Amir glad-hands him, “old neighborhood” chats him up, and the next thing he knows, he’s “closed” the deal.

Roy gives him a bonus and a job. He’ll join the Dutch bros selling this crypto day trading via app scheme, with money coming in and going out and every day producing a one-to-three-percent return. It’s a million dollar business, Roy crows (in Dutch with subtitles, or dubbed) about to become a BIG business.

Meanwhile, there’s trouble on the farm at the restaurant. Developers want to redevelop Dad’s block and jack up his rent. Amir gets to be the Big Man, paying Dad’s rent and talking up crypto to the Old Man’s friends.

We’ve seen all this coming (the picture is quite slow in getting staerted), and we know where all this is going.

How long before the shifting money from account to account thing starts to look fishy? How long before Roy’s extracurricular pharmaceutical habit catches on with Amir? With older Omar taking over bicycle deliveries, how many minutes will pass before the inevitable happens and Amir’s loyalty is given its ultimate test?

It’s all somewhat watchable and absolutely predictable, and Shahine El-Hamus makes an engaging lead playing a character with no time for love, just a bestie (Isabelle Kafando), no time to truly “study” crypto when all he really needs to know is how to persuade people and spread the Gospel According to Roy.

Shahine’s brother Shady El-Hamus directed and co-wrote this immigrants-and-crypto melodrama. And their father, Sabri El-Hamus, a veteran Egyptian-Dutch actor, brings gravitas and heart to Omar, a classic self-made immigrant success story whose success is both limited, and an object lesson in “there are no shortcuts.”

Koole is a rough and menacing Zuckerbergesque villain.

But the predictability becomes a real problem as the narrative dawdles before getting to its crypto point, and meanders a bit as it drifts towards its predetermined finale. More “local color” and “scheme explained” scenes and a little less melodrama would have made all the difference in this crypto variation of an age-old formula.

Rating: TV-MA, drug abuse, some violence, brief nudity, profanity

Cast: Shahine El-Hamus, Minne Koole, Sabri Saad El-Hamus, Loes Schnepper and
Isabelle Kafando

Credits: Directed by Shady El-Hamus, scripted by Shady El-Hamus and Jeroen Scholten van Aschat. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43