Remember when Robert De Niro was an interesting actor? These days his talent, like his character in “The Family,” is in the witness protection program, never to be seen again.
A half-interested De Niro plays the gangster head of a squabbling Sopranos-like family that gets sent to Normandy, France, to clash hilariously with local customs in witness protection. (For an actually funny take on the same idea, see the Nora Ephron-written Steve Martin film “My Blue Heaven.”) Hiding out from the mob bosses who want him dead for ratting out fellow criminals, Giovanni (De Niro) and his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer, doing a 1940s gun-moll accent) and teen children (Dianna Agron, John D’Leo) have been bouncing all over France committing felonies without incurring any consequences from the lawman (Tommy Lee Jones) who has Giovanni under 24-hour surveillance.
In their first days in their new village, the “Blake” family, as they are now known (actually they’re the Manzonis), has behaved completely irrationally — they’ve blown up a grocery store, beaten up a local plumber and (most inexplicable of all) held a cookout for the townsfolk. “Fred Blake” (De Niro’s character) fantasizes about shoving a neighbor’s face on the grill for daring to advise him on how to operate it better.
All of this brutality is played for laughs and in the spirit of frank Americans making short work of le baloney of snooty Frenchmen, but it’s hard to laugh too much at the Blakes, considering they are grade-A psychopaths. Giovanni hospitalizes the plumber and nearly kills him because the tradesman delivers some bad news about the condition of his pipes. Mama firebombs the food mart because she doesn’t like some typical French comments about obese and tasteless Americans. The daughter nearly kills a guy with a tennis racket for touching her shoulder.
In other words, writer-director Luc Besson, a prolific hack, has the kind of taste in comedy you might delicately describe as “French.” The scenes that are meant to be hilarious are as broad as a hedgerow and twice as stiff. If Besson had any sense, he’d recognize his protagonists for the villains they are and put someone we could root for on their trail.
Instead, Besson keeps carrying out tonal shifts that clang like the gearbox of a ’72 Citroën. The daughter, who has a crush on a cute schoolteacher, in consecutive scenes goes from scheming temptress to heartsick romantic to Joe Pesci in a white sundress.
The movie could seemingly drift along forever with the Blakes beating up everyone who annoys them without ever exciting the interest of the police. (Does witness protection really give you a license to commit any felonies you like? Even in France? I’d like to see the treaty that says so.) But halfway through, Besson devises a way to tie the Blakes back to the mob boss in Sing Sing who wants Giovanni dead.
It may be the most preposterous movie coincidence of the decade, so I can’t fail to describe it: The teen son, asked to supply a joke (in English) to the school newspaper, recounts a pun he once heard from the mob boss. A copy of that student newspaper winds up getting recycled and used to wrap a bottle of wine sent to the mob boss’ prison cell. The grateful boss then figures out his enemy must be in Normandy, where he sends his finest team of hitmen.
They create so much commotion that their prey is tipped off in advance, then they do things like leave a trunkful of automatic weapons wide open. Besson’s idea to save the Blakes consists of having them simply pop up behind their assassins, without worrying too much about how they managed to do that.
Besson saves what he thinks is his most amazing joke for near the end: Giovanni is (inexplicably) invited to lecture on film at the local cinema club, though he has never claimed any knowledge of or interest in the subject. Then we watch as De Niro sits down to view . . . “GoodFellas,” without seeming to notice that he’s in it. Hey, it was a long time ago for us, too, Bob. I can scarcely remember your ever being in a good movie either.