FILM
The Family
(15) 111mins
★★✩✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Director Luc Besson creates some uncomfortable shift in tone that undermines the work of his accomplished cast.
REVIEW
There is a good movie somewhere in The Family. In fact, there are two. The sadness is that a hugely talented cast, several pleasurable moments and two fine ideas have been conflated into one misstepping film.
Remember Luc Besson's earlier work? The Fifth Element? How a traditional genre sci-fi collided uncomfortably with some weird camp media satire?
Well, same director, same problem; a fish-out-of-water black comedy becomes a bloody revenge flick and no-one raised their hand in class to point out the mismatch.
There's even a built-in, bona fide, cringe-in-your-seat jump-the-shark moment - but we'll come to that.
First off, the set-up and the successful early segment. A Mafia family are relocated by a witness protection programme to a sleepy Normandy town (where everyone speaks perfect English).
Baggy Fred Manzoni (Robert De Niro), given the cover story that he's writing a history of D-Day, instead taps away at his autobiography reflecting on his life of crime.
Meanwhile wife Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer) and their children Belle (Glee's Dianna Agron) and Warren (John D'Leo) go into the world and try to get to grips with their new slow-lane, small-town existence and their stereotypical, snail-munching neighbours.
Here's the substance of a funny movie. The family, wonderfully and darkly played by the leads, start to impose their New Jersey values on les paysannes - from explosive revenge on the shopkeeper to nascent school extortion rackets.
Fun stuff, well executed and not dissimilar to the deadpan Addams Family schtick.
Despite the efforts of Agent Stansfield (Tommy Lee Jones) the Mob finds out their target is in France and sets off to reclaim its pound of flesh.
How the Mobsters make the breakthrough is a marvel of credulity defying, audience-bating nonsense. Write it down. You may never see its like again.
The filmmakers don't even bother trying to disguise how little effort they made because, presumably they've noticed we've lost interest and they're hurrying to the bazooka and bloodlust finale.
And that final reel is an entirely separate film, which has all the classy violent hallmarks of executive producer Martin Scorsese and has some elaborate set pieces worthy of a film, although not this one.
And the jump the shark moment? Robert De Niro is invited to speak about his investigations into the Second World War by the local film society.
But the selected film doesn't arrive so he has to talk about the substitute instead. What is it? Scorsese's seminal gangster movie Goodfellas, starring, er, Robert De Niro. Groan.
