The Family (2013)

By all accounts, Luc Besson should know what he’s doing by now. Since the early ’90s, he has attached his name to scores of European/American action movies that have usually gone on to considerable financial success. (The most notable recent example is Taken.) As a producer, he is enormously successful. This was also true of his directorial career at one point, but since the days of Léon: The Professional and The Fifth Element, Besson hasn’t been quite as prolific behind the camera. Even so, Besson has been around far too long to make a film as confused and pointless as The Family, a potentially interesting but thoroughly botched comedy (maybe?) about a ex-mob family who find themselves hiding in Normandy thanks to the Witness Protection Program. No two people involved in this film seem to have the same idea of what exactly they’re making, and based on what wound up on the screen it stands to reason that Besson himself was equally clueless.

The patriarch of this titular family is Giovanni Manzoni (Robert De Niro), now known as Fred Blake, and after ratting on much of the New York mafia he is forced to go into hiding with his wife Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer), his daughter Belle (Dianna Agron) and his son Warren (John D’Leo) in the north of France. It seems the four of them make trouble no matter where they wind up, much to the chagrin of FBI agent Robert Stansfield (Tommy Lee Jones). Every member of this family simply cannot control their violent impulses, so the audience is treated to several scenes of them “hilariously” beating up or inflicting terror on all the unknowing French people around them. Also, the real mob is on the hunt for their “snitch” Giovanni, and they are equally skilled at hurting or killing just about everybody they come across. There is one scene where a mobster appears to kill a whole family just for fun, because yeah, that’s real subtle.

All of The Family’s problems boil down to one central flaw, and it’s a big one: it has no earthly idea what it is trying to say or accomplish. There is no understanding of the mobsters at its center, and it only presents them as angry Americans who are one second away from beating people to a pulp. This “joke” is repeated dozens of times with little variation, and it only grows staler with each iteration. It’s also awful hard to believe that an entire family—even mobsters—wouldn’t be able to keep their heads down in a Witness Protection Program situation. These aren’t supposed to be good people, obviously, but they at least need to show some kind of intelligence. There’s an incredibly strange, meta scene late in the film in which Goodfellas comes up, but the movie around it suggests that Besson actually doesn’t understand Goodfellas. The Family doesn’t feature believable mob characters, but instead a bunch of mob clichés pushed off the deep end.

And then there’s the ending, which removes many of the ostensibly comic elements that came before and becomes a generic action movie. Unsurprisingly, this is probably what Besson is best at. Before the guns start a-blazing, The Family more often involves scenes of dialogue and behavior, but they require a directorial touch that he is apparently incapable of. The cast is game enough, and De Niro’s clearly having fun, but it’s in service a larger, dunderheaded package. There were several chances for the movie to explore interesting ideas—the aforementioned Goodfellas scene suggests a movie about mob portrayals in the media or what have you, and that lasts about five seconds—but whenever an opportunity pokes its head out an avalanche of stupidity follows. Besson may be a cinema veteran, but The Family is a pretty clear example of a filmmaker working with no discernible purpose.

Grade: D