Giovanni Manzoni, or I guess I should call
him Fred Blake (Robert DeNiro) is a snitch. Now I forgot
why Fred snitched on the mob, that is if writer / director Luc
Besson even bothered to tell me why, but he snitched on the
mob and now he's in the FBI's witness relocation
program. A program which sends its clients to sunny,
quaint villa's in Europe as opposed to trailer parks in
Tennessee or one cow towns in Nebraska. Yet another
instance where fantasy kicks realities ass. Does this
movie 'The Family' kick ass? Not really. I mean it
could've if I knew what kind of movie it was trying to be.
So as we have mentioned, Giovanni Manzoni snitched on the mob
for some reason or another, and his handler, FBI Agent
Stansfield (Tommy Lee Jones) has relocated him to Italy.
I think. As a side note, while Tommy Lee Jones has
always been deadpan, but this time around I think he has taken
his deadpan delivery to a point in this movie where I think he
was actually dead. That's pretty amazing when you think
about it. Acting while dead. Back on point,
Stansfield had to move Giovannia, or Fred out of Italy,
because while you can take the boy out of the mob, you can't
the mob out of the boy. Now Fred is in a villa in
France, along with his wife Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer), his
adult teenage daughter Belle (Diana Agron) and his son Warren
(John Di Leo).
Life should be good in this little villa, but there are
issues. For one, the French tend to be rude on occasion
which causes things to blow up every once in a while. Or
maybe a plumber isn't completely honest in his dealing which
has bad ramifications for said plumber. Or perhaps a boy
gets picked by the local bully, which might lead to this boy
gaming the system for his revenge, and heaven forbid you try
to take advantage of the pretty girl. Not
recommended. The Blake family, in a word, is
psychotic.
We've seen enough movies to know that you
can't go snitching on the mob and then hope to go on about
your merry business, and the leader of the mob that got
snitched on has been looking for Fred Blake like crazy for
years. And damn if he didn't find him in one of the more
wacky scenarios in the history of all of cinema.
Now the Blake family looks to be in all sorts of
trouble. The Mob is in the south of France with bad
intentions. Really bad intentions. I mean I don't
actually know any mobsters, but if I did I would have to ask
them is raping a victim really necessary before putting a
bullet in the victims head. That doesn't seem logical to
me, but then I'm not a mobster. Anyway, we hope the
Blake family can make it out of this mess, I guess, once Fred
gets back from his 'Goodfellas' retrospective. Yep,
'Goodfellas'. Oh Robert, what are we going to do with
you?
Erratic and uneven, while at the same time being plodding and
predictable, thy name is 'The Family'. Now I think, and
I could be wrong here as I have been many times before, but I
think that Mr. Besson was shooting for a 'Dark Comedy' with
'The Family', and after watching the film I can say I could
see the comedy, and I could see the darkness, but what I don't
think I ever did see was the two coming together. The
first fifteen or twenty minutes of 'The Family' was kind of
comedic, and it is possible that the movie was also darkly
comedic in the early going, but it's been awhile… like a day…
so I can't rightly remember, but then it just stopped being
funny and just turned dark. While I'm sure if it was
handled differently, breaking somebody's legs with a sledge
hammer, or running somebody over with your car on a motorcycle
or attempting suicide or murdering an entire town can be
funny, but it just really wasn't all that funny here.
After a while all attempts at comedy were abandoned, at least
as far as I could tell, and this movie just turned brutal
until becoming some kind of 'Assault on Precinct 13' styled
action movie. Erratic.
It does help, of course, to have Robert DeNiro around who at
this late stage in the great actors career seems to have no
problem making fun of himself, at least if the dollars line
up, and Michelle Pfeiffer was a joy to watch with her
Brooklynese accent… or was it Queens? In fact, all of
the members of the family were fun to watch in action, it's
just that the movie surrounding these people wasn't all that
much fun. Then there's Tommy Lee Jones who looked like
he could've used a defibrillator if one was available.
At the end of this day I still don't know what to make of 'The
Family'. It's not a particularly good movie with its
lack of a consistent theme and uneven presentation, but it is
well acted and briskly paced which does stave off
boredom. Dark comedy is tough to pull off. This is
one that would've been better served by just sticking with
wacky comedy, or maybe just a straight brutal mob revenge
picture.
