The Family

Luc Besson's The Family is a nasty little piece of work disguising itself as a fun comedy.  This is a very violent movie, shockingly so at times, and the fact that most of this violence is performed by the main characters on innocent people made me cringe.  I have no objection to violence being in a comedy, as long as there's a point to it.  But there's little point to this meandering and aimless screenplay, featuring thin characters, and a talented cast of actors who are given little to do.

Remember 1999's Analyze This, which featured Robert De Niro spoofing his own tough guy image?  Well, The Family does the same thing, only not funny and not the slightest bit interesting.  He's Giovanni Manzoni here, a mobster and family man living under the pseudonym Fred Blake ever since he snitched on his former mob boss.  The film's central (and let's face it, sole) joke is that Giovanni and his family are supposed to be in hiding, and not trying to draw attention to themselves, but frequently resort to their old ways, violently thrashing, torturing, and killing anyone who upsets them.  In one scene, a plumber tries to scam Giovanni when he wants the pipes in his new home fixed, so Giovanni responds by beating the man to within an inch of his life, and giving him multiple fractures, which he tries to explain as simple accidents when he takes the man to the hospital.  Ho, ho.

As the movie opens, Giovanni and his family have moved to a tiny little town in Normandy.  His family are just as violent and vengeful as he is, and include wife Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer) and teenage son and daughter Warren (John D'Leo) and Belle (Dianna Agron).  Despite being in witness protection and closely watched by some federal agents led by the straight-laced Robert Stansfield (Tommy Lee Jones), Giovanni and his clan frequently bend the rules, and carry out violent acts toward people that either upset them, or that they just don't like.  As soon as they arrive in their new home, Giovanni pulls a body out of the trunk of his car, and buries it in the backyard.  And the very next day, Maggie blows up the local grocery store because the owner made fun of her for being an American. (Never mind the fact the movie doesn't explain how she even understood him, since he was speaking in French, and it was established before that she understands very little of the language.)

The kids seem to take after their parents.  When they arrive at school, Warren institutes a plan to savagely beat a local bully, while Belle nearly pummels to death any student who tries to hit on her, or looks at her the wrong way.  I think what offended me was not really the violence, but that there is nothing else to these characters.  They simply are maiming and torturing people with very little to no motivation.  If Giovanni and his family had maybe had dimensions, or written as complex and funny characters, I probably wouldn't have been as put off by the violent acts they perform.  But, I think director and co-writer Luc Besson is pretty much making the violence the joke here.  These are shallow people who do terrible things to equally shallow people.  There's nothing behind these characters, or the violent acts they commit, so there's no reason to laugh.

The Family is overlong, and fails at telling the same joke over and over, the joke being that these guys just don't fit in with their new surroundings.  It follows the same sequence of events in just about every scene.  Giovanni or one of his family members tries to fit in, the attempt fails, so a brutal act of violence is committed.  This is a tired and weary movie that keeps up its repetitive nature for far too long.  It's not until the film's last 20 minutes that things pick up a little bit.  That's when Giovanni's former mob boss learns of his location, and sends some of his goons to kill the family.  Here we get some pretty good action, but once again, we don't care about these characters, so there's no real investment on our part.  It also comes far too late to save what has been up to this point a very meandering and aimless film.

And despite Besson filling his cast with A-list talent, he can't get any interesting performances out of them.  De Niro can easily play the role of Giovanni, and has pretty much played him multiple times throughout his career.  But he's given nothing to work with, since his character is written so thin, so it ends up being one of his more forgettable performances.  As for Michelle Pfeiffer, the only notable thing about her performance is her shaky Brooklyn accent, which seems to come and go at will.  Finally, Tommy Lee Jones exists in this movie to simply look exasperated or stone faced at De Niro.  He's actually given the least to do of the cast, and makes you wonder why he even bothered to show up in the first place.

I was bored almost from the start by this drawn out and tone deaf comedy.  The Family is the kind of movie that gives you a bad feeling from the beginning that you're not going to enjoy it, but you try to keep your spirits up, especially by seeing these talented actors up on the screen.  As the film dragged on, and I began to realize it wasn't going to redeem itself, I sunk in my seat and waited for the whole experience to be over.  It wasn't over soon enough.

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