Family, The (2013) [Blu-ray]
Comedy | Crime | Thriller

Tagline: Michelle Pfeiffer is one bad mother

Academy Award Winners Robert De Niro and Tommy Lee Jones star in this action-comedy from executive producer Martin Scorsese and acclaimed director Luc Besson. A Mafia boss and his family are relocated to a sleepy town in France under the Witness Protection Program after snitching on the mob. Despite Agent Stansfield's (Jones) best efforts to keep them in line, Fred Blake (Robert De Niro), his wife Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer), and their children Belle (Dianna Agron) and Warren (John D'Leo), can't help resorting to old habits by handling their problems the "family" way. Chaos ensues as their former Mafia cronies try to track them down, and scores are settled in the unlikeliest of settings.

Storyline: A mafia boss and his family are relocated to a sleepy town in France under the witness protection program after snitching on the mob. Despite the best efforts of CIA Agent Stansfield (Tommy Lee Jones) to keep them in line, Fred Manzoni (Robert De Niro), his wife Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer) and their children Belle (Dianna Agron) and Warren (John D'Leo) can't help but revert to old habits and blow their cover by handling their problems the "family" way, enabling their former mafia cronies to track them down. Chaos ensues as old scores are settled in the unlikeliest of settings in this darkly funny film by Luc Besson (Taken, Transporter). Written by Minoesch

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman on December 18, 2013 -- There's a lot of insistent blather about our national debt and deficit (do you know the difference?), and in the interests of helping to find a solution to these pressing problems, may I suggest that someone look at the budget of the Federal Witness Protection Program? According to at least a couple of recent entertainments, we (meaning the government) evidently have untold riches to shower people (in both cases about to be cited, former criminals) with enough money to set up lives in rather exotic locations. Netflix has been enjoying a bit of success with Lilyhammer, a whimsical series built around Steven Van Zandt (yes, that Steven Van Zandt) as a Mafia underboss who snitches on a "coworker" and chooses Lillehammer, Norway as the place he wants to set up shop (literally) with a new identity. Luc Besson's recent film The Family ups that ante by placing an entire family under witness protection and then shipping them off to the picturesque region of Normandy in France. Besson is of course better known for exploiting the visceral action adventure activity of criminals in films like Léon: The Professional and La Femme Nikita rather than the kind of stale dysfunctional comedy he explores in The Family, and Besson himself seems a little unsure of his footing throughout the film, veering rather wildly from quasi-slapstick to more genuinely dramatic fare throughout the film. Besson has often been accused of emphasizing style over substance (an accusation I mentioned in my review of his largely charming The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec), but there's not even much substance here, either.

The Family starts with a terrifying scene where a sweet Italian family is assassinated by a hitman, and then quickly segues to an in media res segment that introduces us to the so-called "Blake" family as they attempt to ferret out their new address in the Normandy village of Cholong-sur-Avre. The Blakes seem like a typically normal, harried family— perhaps on vacation—and there's no explanation of what their story has to do with the opening moments of the film. Only after Fred Blake (Robert De Niro) tells his wife he needs to get some more bags out of their station wagon, and instead disposes of a dead body wrapped in plastic, is the audience let in on the fact that this is no ordinary family. It of course turns out that the Blakes are not indeed the Blakes, but the former Manzonis, part of a large crime family in Manhattan. Fred's real name is Giovanni Manzoni, and he has snitched on his former capo, who is now on the hunt for the family from his jail cell. The family that met their fate in the film's opening sequence had been mistaken for the Manzonis, and the capo wants to make sure no further errors are made.

The rest of the Blake clan consists of wife Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer), son Warren (John D'Leo) and daughter Belle (Dianna Agron), who rather quickly (and improbably) matriculate into rural French culture, albeit with the occasional outburst of violence when anyone gets in their way. Fred, meanwhile, is having a bit harder time at adjusting, until he finds an old typewriter in the junk left behind in their dilapidated bungalow, and begins typing up his memoirs. Meanwhile, an FBI agent named Stansfield (Tommy Lee Jones), who's assigned to look after the family, has shown up and has begged Frank to lay low in this location, since evidently Stansfield has had to move the family several times previously in order to keep them relatively hidden.

Already there are cracks in the screenplay by Besson and Michael Caleo. The film seems to want to be a whimsical comedy, as evidenced by the scene where Maggie blows up the local village grocery store when she doesn't like the store owner's dismissive attitude toward her request for peanut butter. And the film's underscore, by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine, is full of that Danny Elfman Desperate Housewives approach of brief little phrases punctuated by pizzicato strings that is supposedly informing us all of this is just so funny. But the film keeps veering off into weird tangents that see both Warren and Belle beating the crap out of various people (played for laughs, but delivering none), while the capo's hitman slowly closes in on the family, threatening their very existence. There's a decided lack of logic, as well. Virtually everyone speaks English in the film, which may have been done out of necessity, but which I can tell you, having spent some considerable time in Normandy, is most definitely not the case, especially when you get into the smaller villages like the one depicted. Even Stansfield's insistence that the family not divulge too much about themselves is completely contradicted by his equal insistence that they invite all the neighbors to a big barbecue so that they can make friends.

Meanwhile Warren's nefarious activities at high school and Belle's misguided affair with a college student get both kids out of the house just when the hitman finally shows up. Fred, in one of the film's worst decisions, attends a film festival with Stansfield where GoodFellas is being screened and a well intentioned neighbor of Fred's has invited his commentary (The Family was Executive Produced by Martin Scorsese). This would seem to offer comedic opportunities galore, but it (to purloin a phrase supposedly culled from the world of gangsters) swims with the fishes. The fact that it's intercut with Maggie's increasingly desperate attempts to figure out where everyone is before the hitmen kill them is an even odder directorial choice by Besson.

It's no big surprise, then, that the two most effective sequences in The Family are the bookending segments of the film. The first, the aforementioned hit on the Italian family, is quick, deliberate and shocking. The final several minutes of the film detail the attempted hit on the Blakes and their various reactions, and it shows Besson to be in typically fine form in staging exciting, viscerally alarming violence. Again, he tries to inject a little humor into the mix (after a spectacular explosion, Fred utters his favorite word, the F-bomb), but the joke is actually on the film itself: Besson should have played this one straight from the get go, especially with the cast of the caliber he's assembled for The Family.

The Family simply doesn't know what kind of film it wants to be. Besson had two choices here, either playing everything as an outright farce, or playing it straight as a thriller. The weird mash up on display satisfies neither genre and instead will probably leave most audience members shaking their heads that such a fine cast (and, frankly, director) wasted their efforts on something this lackluster.

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[CSW] -4.4- One certainly needs a slightly distorted sense of humor to really appreciate this black comedy presented in an absurdist vein. Fortunately it did appeal to my sense of humor. Most of the film shows the family reacting to being disrespected, cheated maligned and in a few cases outright beaten. With the daughter defending herself from a car full of teenaged date rapists, the son is responding to a pack of violent school bullies, and the mother and father reacting to being taken advantage of and in the case of the father attempted cheating and robbing extortion. This is a fantasy. Imagine if you could react to these kinds of insults, attacks and indignities the way you secretly wishes you could. Because it was so over the top I found it humorous and I found myself laughing at many unusual places and situations throughout the movie. I will likely add this movie to my collection as I could watch it several times. But if it doesn't, as they say, "strike your fancy" you may be disappointed so I suggest you rent it first.
[V4.5-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box .


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