MAFIA MAMMA - Mark Reviews Movies

Mafia Mamma, Bleecker Street

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 13, 2023

The jokes are right there in Mafia Mamma. You can sense them in theory or even see them in practice, but for an assortment of reasons, none of them is funny. There's something off about the staging, the timing, the setups, the payoffs, and the general performance of the comedy here. The result is an especially dispiriting experience, because so much of this seems as if it should be relatively easy.

The premise alone is obvious and obviously filled with all sorts of promise. An unassuming, middle-aged wife and mother, whose husband is an unappreciative jerk and whose son is about to head off to college, discovers that she has inherited a criminal empire in Italy. The jokes might seem to write themselves, and what's strange about J. Michael Feldman and Debbie Jhoon's screenplay is the humor feels as if it is both painfully predictable and non-existent.

Maybe it's all too obvious. We meet Kristin (Toni Collette), the aforementioned heir to a mafia enterprise, who receives a call from her grandfather's assistant Bianca (Monica Bellucci) with some sad news. The grandfather, whom she hasn't seen since her childhood living in Italy, has died.

One of the unfortunate things about modern movies needing to sell themselves before people get into the theater and to convince an audience that they'll know exactly what to expect is that this one gives away its first big punch line before a line of dialogue is spoken. We know the grandfather died a violent death, since director Catherine Hardwicke opens the movie with the camera moving along the path of a bloody massacre at the old man's villa. When the title arrives, there are no more questions as to what the whole conceit of this story is, so when Kristin is stunned to find her grandfather's funeral become the target of assassins from a rival family, the surprise and the comedic potential already have been deflated.

There is a bit of delay before that happens, as we learn about Kristin's son Domenick (Tommy Rodger) leaving California for college, the affair her husband Paul (Tim Daish) has been having with a younger woman, and her general frustration with how her personal life and career as an overlooked woman in advertising have become. The trip to a villa in Rome, even if it is for a funeral, could be the perfect opportunity for Kristin to have some fun and think of her own desires for once in her life.

At least, that's the opinion of her best friend Jenny (Sophia Nomvete), a sassy cliché of such an extreme nature that it makes one uncomfortable. The character isn't nearly as discomforting as a later scene, though, in which an attempted rape is played for laughs involving double entendre, distracted witnesses, and catastrophic genital mutilation. It's such a miscalculation that the scene would almost certainly sour the comedy before and after it—if there were any of the real stuff to be found here, of course.

Most of the attempted and/or alleged gags are fairly innocuous, though. Kristin is definitely not the cutthroat type to be involved in a world as brutal as that of the mafia, so yes, it's vaguely amusing to see her try to play tough or all-business, only to be reflexively polite or overwhelmed by trying homemade pasta and gelato for the first time. Collette is clearly having some fun in the role, but in trying her damnedest to squeeze laughs out of such straightforward material, she comes across as thanklessly foolish as a result.

So many scenes here are, basically, classically structured gags, yet everything, especially the timing, is off-kilter. One involves a private meeting with the boss of a rival family and a vial of poison (which he retrieves from his backside in a manner that's too detailed to be awkwardly funny), but it's in too much of a hurry to arrive at the punch line for the joke to breathe. The whole third act, which attempts to bring together a romance with local man Lorenzo (Giulio Corso) and a standoff with the other families and a police raid and a court trial and a last-minute betrayal, is in a rush put all of the remaining or postponed ideas on the table. Those are all shortchanged, and they're pretty cheap in the first place.

It all somehow feels both lazy and desperate. Mafia Mamma mostly leaves one wondering which is the worse quality for a comedy to possess, although having both turns out to be far from ideal.

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