Bill O’Byrne’s Bargain Bin Blues: The Family

The Family | Value for money: $$

• Written and directed by Luc Besson.
• Starring Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, some kid from Glee,Tommy Lee Jones.

PHIL vs BILL
The family that slays together stays together in this violent black comedy about a New Jersey mobster trying to live incognito with his wife and teenage kids in France. They’re in the FBI’s witness protection programme, struggling to get to grips with the Gauls and going straight, when their identities and whereabouts are inadvertently revealed to the gangsters they snitched on. When the old gang turns up to exact payback, the tone changes from fish-out-of-water to sleeping with the fishes. An engaging cast and some quirky touches compensate for a fitfully funny script that straitjackets writer/director Luc Besson’s action strengths. — Phil Wakefield.

When someone is pitching a movie idea to the folks with the money, a really handy idea is for the funders to say: “So where does this get filed in the video store?”

Or, due to the demise of many of those, “Which genre does it fit into at Netflix? Is it Action Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Alien Sci-Fi, Classic Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Classic Lithuanian Alien Action Sci Fi RomCom Terror?”

That sort of thing.

That is so people going into the store, or searching 17 zillion movies, know what they are getting into. It’s a helpful filtering system that we primates like.

It’s so you don’t get Andre Rieu Live in your Nana’s Lounge when your particular preference is Full On Machine Gun Slaughter by Women of the Land of The Norks.

The Family needed that kind of guidance at the pitching level. Writers Luc Besson (who’s also the director) and Michael Caleo apparently couldn’t make up their mind. It’s Offbeat Mafia Comedy, it’s Mafia Action Flick, it’s Family Togetherness Warm Fuzzies Mafia Movie, it’s a Whole Family are a Bunch of Vile, Violent Arseholes who Deserve Death movie.

Sometimes such boundary transgressions are fine, and even work well in the whole. An American Werewolf in London is comedy, horror AND romcom and works on every level. Starship Troopers is an action-packed political satire that’s a lefty-goading slaughter fest. It works brilliantly.

The Family seems a kind of giant in-joke for someone.

It is about a mafia leader who snitches and has to go on the run with his family to avoid being whacked for the big money put on his head. Alas, they keep blowing their cover and are moved again, into a small French village, watched by two agents across the road and the always good Tommy Lee Jones.

It can be outlandishly in-house. In one scene De Niro addresses a film society about the mafia in New York. The movie of the night is Goodfellas. Did I mention Martin Scorsese was an executive producer for The Family? Martin Scorsese was an executive producer for The Family.

Some bits are good – Pfeiffer is particularly charming as the mum, though she has a rather hard attitude towards smarmy French grocery store operators. De Niro is a self aware writer, a loving father, and a sadistic beater of plumbers.

The two kids trying to fit into the rather hostile French school they’re in are also good, right up till they unleash reasonably live-threatening beatings upon students for perceived slights.

But perhaps I am being too precious. A scene involving the daughter, Dianna Agron, beating the snot out of some fellow male students with a tennis racket totally delighted my younger sister. Or maybe that’s just a gender appreciation thing.

The film also includes the most audacious series of coincidences to drive a plot since a farm hick from Tatooine ended up snogging his sister.

So perhaps it is best to treat this a semi amusing, kind of actiony part of an arc that mob-movie lovers will appreciate. Because it sure doesn’t work as anything else.