Movie Review: 'Mafia Mamma' is a Strange and Terrible Movie

Mafia Mamma (2023)

Directed by Catherine Hardwicke

Written by Michael J. Feldman, Debbie Jhoon

Starring Toni Collette, Monica Bellucci

Release Date April 14th, 2023

Published April 17th, 2023

There is something just off about Mafia Mamma. This is a movie where the lead murders a man by repeatedly jamming her high heel into the man's groin and then his eye socket to the point where it's noted that pieces of the man's scrotum were found in his eye socket. And yet, it's also a film that tonally is intended to be a comedy about a woman finding her confidence for the first time, leaving her husband, beating empty-nest syndrome, and seeking the things that make her happy rather than worrying about others. Not surprisingly, the Girlboss finding her feet story clashes with the scrotum in the eye story.

Mafia Mamma stars Toni Collette as Kristen, a deeply put-upon working mom. As we join the story, Kristen is fretting over the fact that her beloved son, Domenick (Tommy Rodger), is leaving for college. The empty syndrome is strong with Kristen, she's a mess. It's set to be the first time that she and her musician husband, Paul (Tim Daish), have been alone together in 18 years. Naturally, that won't last as Paul is immediately revealed as cheating on Kristen. He's not gone from the movie but this latest humiliation is the catalyst for the rest of the story.

Kristen's grandfather was, until recently, the head of an Italian crime family, something Kristen was not aware of. Kristen's mother had escaped the mafia life years earlier and Don Grandpa had allowed this so as to keep Kristen safe from his enemies. Now that he's dead however, the crime family belongs to Kristen. Yes, apparently you can inherit a mafia family. Technically, Kristen has inherited an Italian Vineyard that happens to be a mob front, but regardless. Wanting to escape her cheating husband, Kristen accepts an invitation to her grandfather's funeral.

At the funeral, Kristen is nearly killed as a rival family aims to take advantage of the Don's death. It will be up to Kristen, under the guidance of her grandfather's consigliere, Bianca (Monica Bellucci), to attempt to broker peace with this other family. To say that Kristen is not prepared to be a Mob leader is the entire comic premise of the film. Kristen works in pharmaceutical sales for her day job so, yeah, being a mob boss is not in her typical skill set. Though one could draw a comparison between Pharmaceutical companies and the Mob, this movie isn't smart enough to make that joke.

Instead, we watch Kristen compile an accidental body count. Her tete a tete with a fellow mob boss ends in death, I mentioned the scrotum in the eye guy, and there are several more gruesome, bloody deaths and stabbings in Mafia Mamma. The filmmakers appear to want to be true to the reality of this scenario, the idea that Kristen would be a very unlikely and comically underprepared mob boss and the reality that being in the mob is a grim and bloody business that very often ends in a lot of death. A lot of gruesome, bloody death.

There is a perverse quality to Mafia Mamma that I wanted to find appealing. The idea that they are making a 'woman's picture' but making it with the kind of violence that generally appeals to male audiences. Sadly, this perverse quality is too often muted. The filmmakers can't decide if they want to make a very broad dark comedy or a feature film fitting of the joke title 'Eat, Pray, F***.' If you crossed the movie Girls Trip with the grit of Boyz in the Hood, you get the sense of what Mafia Mamma is going for and it should be very obvious why that would fail. Broad silly Girlboss comedy crosses paths with an even more gruesome version of The Godfather is a terrible idea.

It's a weird tone, to say the very least, and it would take a great deal of skill and care to thread the needle and make this premise and presentation click. It never clicks in Mafia Mamma. The film is too broad and then not broad enough. It wants to be taken seriously and then it wants you to laugh at the incongruities of Toni Collette as a suburban mom turned mob boss. The right tone simply eludes director Catherine Hardwicke from beginning to end. The film is too soft and squishy and too bloody and gross as the film whipsaws from one version of this material to another.

Toni Collette is a phenomenal actress but she is poorly directed in Mafia Mamma. Her performance is shrill and defiant of any tone the film intends to evoke. Collette's high strung performance clashes with everything in the movie, both the bloody mob picture and the white-girl, Stella's Got Her Groove Back thing the movie is also trying to do. It's an utterly baffling performance that is misconceived on every level. Collette isn't funny, she's not sexy, though I think the movie wants her to be, and she's just flailing her way through every scene, desperate to tell us how funny what she is doing is supposed to be. It's a little embarrassing to watch.

Mafia Mamma could not be possibly be any worse. The premise is terrible, the execution is awful, and the production, considering that the film is directed by a genuine pro, is shockingly mediocre. What Catherine Hardwicke saw in this material is beyond me. I read an article in which she stated that she liked the idea of telling a story where a middle aged woman felt heard for the first time. Why she thought this was the movie to bring that idea forward is a mystery. What part of a woman murdering a man and leaving pieces of his scrotum accidentally in his eye-socket gelled with the idea of being heard for the first time is a mystery I'm not sure the director herself could clear up.

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