Mafia Mamma is a film that is so painfully awful that there are times when it hardly seems like it is even real—it often feels like one of those absurdly exaggerated pseudo-films that we get a brief glimpse or two of in the background of another and almost certainly better movie. With its combination of wacky comedy and mob-related business, the purpose was presumably to give audiences something along the lines of Analyze This but bungles the job so badly that it should probably be retitled Fredo in order to demonstrate some degree of truth in advertising.
Toni Collette plays Kristin, a harried American woman already reeling from the recent departure of her son for college, her idiot husband’s infidelity and rampant sexism at the ad agency where she works when she receives a call from Italy informing her that her grandfather, who she hasn’t seen since she was a young child, has passed away and she needs to come in order to settle his affairs. After she arrives, she soon discovers that Gramps was actually the head of a Mafia empire who was killed as part of a conflict with a rival family. Not only that, he has named Kristin to take over the entire operation, much to the distress of a hotheaded cousin who assumed he would be named leader. At first, Kristin has no interest—she wants to spend her time in Italy indulging in her own version of an Eat, Pray Love scenario—but with the help of Bianca (Monica Bellucci), her grandfather’s loyal consigliere, she decides to stick it out for a while, fending off attacks from the rival family and police investigations, being wooed by a handsome stranger who couldn’t possibly have an ulterior motive and finding a way for the family to diversify into more legal means of operation.
As dreadful as this may all sound in the recounting, it is nothing compared to the almost surreal experience of watching it play out in all its ghastly glory before your increasingly disbelieving eyes. The film is obviously meant to be a farce but the screenplay by J. Michael Feldman and Debbie Jhoon does not bring anything to the table that hasn’t already been seen in any number of other films involving straight-laced people inadvertently gettin caught up in the wacky world of organized crime. That is bad enough but what really sinks the film is how director Catherine Hardwicke completely fails to find the right tone for the material—her idea of handling farce is to have the actors playing to the rafters with performances so broad that they inspire more migraines and laughs and her bizarre decision to accentuate the violence and gore throughout (including numerous close-ups of body parts being hacked off) proves to be more jarring than amusing.
Collette and Bellucci are both good actresses, of course, but they respond to the substandard material with overly hammy turns that will certainly go down as low points in their respective careers. In the case of Collette, things are even more baffling because not only does she star in the film, she also serves as one of the seemingly endless array of producers, none of whom evidently had the intestinal fortitude to point out that this project never should have found its way before the cameras. I can only assume that the thought of a paid working vacation to Italy must have overridden such thoughts and while I guess I can understand that way of thinking on some level, I must point out that I have seen home movies that were more coherently assembled that Mafia Mamma and funnier to boot.