Sadistic mashup of two cultures features De Niro in a slightly less bad movie than usual

The Family, released in France as Malavita, taken from the name of a handsome black-faced German Shepherd that's the least humiliated actor in the piece, is a movie that makes you cringe to see it in Paris on its opening day in a packed theater. According to Allociné the French critics don't care for it (press rating 2.4) but the public does (audience rating 3.5). It makes one as ashamed for American movies as for the French audience that laps it up and worried about the sweeping global dilution of quality this signals. Whatever few laughs or amused smiles this outrageous gangster comedy riffing off The Sopranos arouses are undermined by a sinking feeling of jointly disintegrating quality and taste.

It's hardly a relief to know The Family/Malavita is by a Frenchman, Luc Besson, now a major producer who (relatively speaking) only occasionally directs. It still exemplifies some of the worst aspects of today's Hollywood. It is a gleeful celebration of violence featuring a American mafia family in some weird witness protection program that takes them to the south of France. Despite the French setting and a bit of French dialogue, everybody, from local mayor to plumber to teacher to lyçée students, speaks fluent idiomatic English. It's not exactly sure why France is dragged in other than for production reasons, though it's also not exactly sure if the movie would work if set in the US. Everyone in the family is sadistically cruel. Gangster husband De Niro beats people to death with baseball bats. Wife Michelle Pfeiffer sets fire to supermarkets and other things. The cocky brother (John D'Leo), who resembles Alexander Gould who plays the blithely evil younger son Shane Botwin in the TV series Weeds, likes automatic weapons. His dreamy aggressive blonde sister (Dianna Agron) enjoys mangling opponents with tennis rackets. After a lot of corpses and brutalizing, there is a super-violent finale that, as often happens in Hollywood, is longer on spectacle than coherence. This is not a very good movie,though it has some laughs and one can see how it could have been better. And it has great or at least very good actors in it, including Tommy Lee Jones. Whatever: the opening day Paris audience lapped it up.

The family, heavily backed up by FBI handlers even in their umteenth French town, keeps having to move because hubby De Niro and wife Pfeiffer's sadistic violence destroys their cover and they must relocate and change names. Their mafia enemies are looking for them, even from federal prison, and will descend on them eventually due to a preposterously far-fetched transmission of information. The brother and sister must go to school, where they immediately dig in, the boy starting elaborate scams, the girl beginning to seduce a handsome young bourgeois math tutor.

This movie is seriously marred by its sadistic violence from the start to finish -- are we supposed to identify with these goons? -- but had that been cut down 85% along with the dumb vulgar verbal humor (doubtless not bothersome to a French audience reading subtitles?), The Family might have been an enjoyable romp. But there are plenty of other "if's": if De Niro's manner had not become so ritualized and clichéd. If Michelle Pfieffer were not sadly evoking a similar role in a delightful film of 25 years ago, Jonathan Demme's Married to the Mob. If she's doing that it's a pity it's not in something better, and it's too bad it's been so long since Demme made those brilliant, hilarious films. If somehow or other Besson had avoided the absurdity of having a host of French characters, brutally satirized at some points by the way, who speak perfect English. If the ending were subtle and slippery instead of ultra-violent. This is a very lazy movie. It could be funny. If we laugh at the TV Weeds -- it's not to all tastes, but I definitely do -- we could laugh without self-disgust or shame at this material.

A review of Luc Besson's 20-film directorial career is a puzzlement. Does anyone remember his very avant-gardist, really film-school debut Le dernier combat? It was strange enough to linger in a corner of the mind reserved for dogged experiments. He is most respected perhaps for La Femme Nikita. But one might get enjoyably lost in the over-long celebration of the sea, The Big Blue. And then he did something about Joan of Arc. His children's epic about Adèle de Blanc-Sec is elaborate, harmless, almost admirable. Mostly they seem overblown flops. The unifying thread is that there is none. This time he has gone mainstream Hollywood, with a touch of panache if not taste, and the unique flavor of a French setting. This is partly a French film, with Hollywood stars, but lots of French actors, only nearly all speaking the aforementioned idiomatic English. Maybe French lycéens are starting to speak that way. But I doubt it. This is an example of Hollywood movies not-so-subtly invading French culture, despite all France's postwar efforts. Avoid.

The Family/Malavita, , 111 mins., debuted in the US 10th and 13th Sept., screened for this review on its French opening day 23rd Oct. at UGC Odéon at a packed late afternoon showing. Surprisingly, the screenplay is adapted by Besson and Michael Caleo from a novel by Tonino Benacquista, who co-wrote two of Jacques Audiard's excellent films, Read My Lips and The Beat My Heart Skipped.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.