The Family
It's time for De Niro to take another shot at a mob movie. However, does he make it entertaining? Let's find out.
The movie opens up with this family moving to a small town in France under the witness protection program because some guy in jail wants them dead. Once they're at their new house, they're given their new names. The family now consists of Fred (Robert De Niro), Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer), Belle (Dianna Agron), and Warren Blake (John D'Leo). However, there's one thing about this particular family that keeps them from fully blending in. They're a mafia clan. So throughout their stay at their new place, they'll have to try and blend in by not resorting to their mafia ways of living, which proves to be harder than it sounds.
For starters, I really enjoy the way the movie fills in the backstory of the family. Fred spends a lot of time writing his memoirs, which worries some people, but it's an interesting way of telling us how Fred met Maggie and who Fred is as a person. He's also the best character for the movie to focus on because he's not afraid to let his mafia past get the better of him at times. I also really like how the family will go through anything to make sure that everyone is OK in the end.
Now for the negatives, which I do have a lot to say here. Right away, there's some things you'll notice. One thing is how the movie handles its subtitles when someone is speaking French. It's not the usual kind where they just pop the subtitles on the bottom of the screen for easy reading. No, this film wants to be artsy with it. So they throw the subtitles anywhere they feel like it, which can be a major problem because a lot of the time the subtitles blend in with the background, making them harder to read. There's also this side-story about the daughter falling in love with her math tutor that goes nowhere and only serves as a reason for her to be outside the house when the big climax hits. Then there's the moments where they reach way to far for something to happen. For example, without spoiling anything, there's how the villain finds out where the family lives. There's several ways to do such a thing. Maybe they have someone that's spying around the neighborhood and sees one of the family members passing by. That would work, but that's not what happens. Instead, the son writes a single phrase from his childhood, a commonly used one, for his school paper and all of a sudden, that commonly used phrase automatically means that the family must be here. Look, there's suspension of disbelief, but this is too much. There's millions of better ways they could have done this.
So should you watch The Family? Only if you like mafia type movies. The film seems to be advertised as a comedy, and it doesn't help that the premise of the film fits a comedy, but the comedy aspect doesn't work. It's not funny. However, as a mafia movie, it's pretty good.
The movie opens up with this family moving to a small town in France under the witness protection program because some guy in jail wants them dead. Once they're at their new house, they're given their new names. The family now consists of Fred (Robert De Niro), Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer), Belle (Dianna Agron), and Warren Blake (John D'Leo). However, there's one thing about this particular family that keeps them from fully blending in. They're a mafia clan. So throughout their stay at their new place, they'll have to try and blend in by not resorting to their mafia ways of living, which proves to be harder than it sounds.
For starters, I really enjoy the way the movie fills in the backstory of the family. Fred spends a lot of time writing his memoirs, which worries some people, but it's an interesting way of telling us how Fred met Maggie and who Fred is as a person. He's also the best character for the movie to focus on because he's not afraid to let his mafia past get the better of him at times. I also really like how the family will go through anything to make sure that everyone is OK in the end.
Now for the negatives, which I do have a lot to say here. Right away, there's some things you'll notice. One thing is how the movie handles its subtitles when someone is speaking French. It's not the usual kind where they just pop the subtitles on the bottom of the screen for easy reading. No, this film wants to be artsy with it. So they throw the subtitles anywhere they feel like it, which can be a major problem because a lot of the time the subtitles blend in with the background, making them harder to read. There's also this side-story about the daughter falling in love with her math tutor that goes nowhere and only serves as a reason for her to be outside the house when the big climax hits. Then there's the moments where they reach way to far for something to happen. For example, without spoiling anything, there's how the villain finds out where the family lives. There's several ways to do such a thing. Maybe they have someone that's spying around the neighborhood and sees one of the family members passing by. That would work, but that's not what happens. Instead, the son writes a single phrase from his childhood, a commonly used one, for his school paper and all of a sudden, that commonly used phrase automatically means that the family must be here. Look, there's suspension of disbelief, but this is too much. There's millions of better ways they could have done this.
So should you watch The Family? Only if you like mafia type movies. The film seems to be advertised as a comedy, and it doesn't help that the premise of the film fits a comedy, but the comedy aspect doesn't work. It's not funny. However, as a mafia movie, it's pretty good.