Film Review - Mafia Mamma
Images courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
From the Catherine Hardwicke, director of Twilight (no malice intended, self-admitted Twihard here), comes a film that'll make you wish you were watching Gotti instead: Mafia Mamma. Starring Toni Collette as suburban housewife Kristin, who becomes the de facto leader of a mafia family after her grandfather dies, Mafia Mamma aspires to be a comedy, but it’s about as funny as the funeral in the film's first act. It’s a movie that wastes the talents of everyone on screen, from the cast, to the beautiful country and culture of Italy itself.
I'm gonna level with you here, I did not expect much from a film called Mafia Mamma. I expected a handful of fun gags, some girlbossery, and perhaps a tad too big of a helping of cringey self-aware humor. Instead, I got a lazy and borderline offensively unfunny theatre experience. Rather than a quirky fish-out-of-water narrative, the only fish out of water was national treasure Toni Collette, here found dead in a dried up puddle by the side of a landfill site. She does her best to invoke some charisma, but the material she's working with is just, well, let's say even calling it material is an insult to tissue paper (hey, at least she got her trip to Italy, get that bag). At the risk of sounding like yet another joyless movie critic, the little excitement I did feel came from imagining myself as one of the many audience members who seemed to be going nuts for just the absolute bare minimum, which has led to me referring to the film as Joker for wine mums on multiple occasions.
After the onslaught of Italian stereotypes I'd endured over the 48 hours prior to seeing this (First, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, followed immediately after by The Pope's Exorcist, unironically a far better comedy), I felt like I was losing my mamma mia-mind as the film leapt from uninspired projection-fantasy into gory action/comedy territory. Anyone who knows me, knows a splash of blood is usually a surefire way to win me over, but here it just felt like the writers ran out of ideas beyond the ludicrously simple premise. It's like if Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo suddenly had a scene from Drag Me To Hell play out in the middle of it, minus any of the charm of the latter and the product-of-its-time defence of the former.
Much like Joker, Mafia Mamma is not a comedy, it’s a tragedy. It’s a tragedy that this film was made, that it was released in the year of our lord 2023, and that the target demographic is so starved for films that aren't straight-to-Netflix that this could be seen as a win. It’s a tragedy that I had to sit through it and write this review. Mamma Mia.
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Mafia Mamma is screening in cinemas from Thursday 13th April. For tickets and more info, check out Paramount Australia.