The Family is a comedy. This is made evident by the gratingly jolly music that plays over every scene, if not by the film’s clunky contrivances and desperate search for a good punchline. Luc Besson’s big idea is to plonk a violent, sweary Mafia family into the rarified environs of the French countryside, but there’s a serious lack of imagination, from the first-base casting (Robert De Niro as the don, Michelle Pfeiffer as the woman married to the Mob, Tommy Lee Jones as the dogged FBI agent, a bloke from The Wire as a bloke monitoring a wire) to a meta scene involving GoodFellas that gives meta a bad name.
The Family Review
A former mob man (De Niro) and his family are placed in the witness protection program and dispatched to France so they can start a new life. The trouble is, they can't stop solving problems using their old methods, and their past life keeps catching up with them...
Release Date:
22 Nov 2013
Running Time:
111 minutes
Certificate:
15
Original Title:
Family, The
Another to airbrush out of the De Niro back catalogue.
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