Review – The Family
What on earth Robert De Niro was thinking when he thumbed through the script for this Luc Besson-helmed miasma, I can only speculate. The fact that he willingly stars in such dross, dross which inanely references De Niro’s own, vastly superior back catalogue, puts me firmly in mind of a man greedily eyeing up a new snooker table for his new loft conversion and cold-heartedly totting up the economics of such a frivolity. Whatever the motivation (and I assume it was purely financial) I hope he’s pleased with himself, it’s only right that somebody should glean a small amount of joy from this feeble mess.
De Niro, previously an actor of some note, shuffles his way around as the patriarch of a mafia family trapped within the frustrating, Gallic confines of the FBI’s witness protection programme. A programme which sees him and his family forced to endure the relentless misery of the picturesque Normandy countryside. De Niro’s Giovanni Manzoni struggles to keep a low profile under the guise of a writer researching a book on the D-Day landings. A task which as no less arduous for his mobster family who must put up with hordes of typically rude neighbours, schoolyard protection rackets and buttery French cuisine.
A lazy exercise in simplistic, eye-rolling non-comedy from a writer/director who can barely be credited with anything approaching a coherent sense of humour. Besson’s trick appears to be to roll-out winking allusions to xenophobia and stereotype by the fistful, all the while punctuating his nonsense with bursts of unpleasant violence.
Tommy Lee Jones provides some sorely needed relief as the wearily bedraggled FBI agent tasked with keeping De Niro on a short leash; but even he is largely powerless as he struggles manfully to inject any semblance of dignity into the proceedings.
A cinema club scene in which De Niro pontificates on mafia tropes in relation to one of his own previous offerings (and don’t tell me you haven’t already guessed which one) leaves you wondering if the entire exercise, all one-hundred-and-odd wretched minutes of it, wasn’t just some nasty trick at everyone’s expense.
[rating=2]
Chris Banks
Genre:
Comedy, Action, Thriller
Distributor:
E1 Entertinment UK
Rating:
15
Release Date:
22nd November 2013 (UK)
Director:
Luc Besson
Cast:
Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Dianna Agron, Tommy Lee Jones, John D’Leo
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