Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Reuters/Getty
On a rainy April afternoon, I sat down for what I was sure would be the campsterpiece of the spring cinematic season, Mafia Mamma. If you haven’t heard, Mafia Mamma stars Toni Collette as a suburban mom turned Mafia don—a logline that stands out on the film’s poster, because of how it looks and reads like it should rhyme, even though it doesn’t. Not even a slant rhyme. Surely, a snappier choice would’ve been to play “mom” off “mob” in some fashion? But, I digress.
This plot is ingenious. Of course, we should give Toni Collette a gun, and have her run around Italy as a bumbling, amateur mob boss. That’s precisely the kind of thing that most movies are missing. Avatar 2: The Way of Water would’ve been so much more engaging for someone like me, if it was titled Avatar 2: The Way of Toni Collette’s Accidental International Incidents, instead.
When the movie began—and dropped an undeniably fantastic, bold title card over a shot of Collette’s co-star, Monica Bellucci, standing among a sea of dead mob members—I thought I was in the right place. But over the course of its (inconsiderately long) runtime, I found myself asking several questions that I was not expecting to ponder when I walked in the door. Queries such as: Why? How? When will this be over? And: Is it too late for God to save us? To put it quite simply: Mafia Mamma is a disaster of epic proportions.