The Family (2013)

The Family is a gleefully unhinged culture-clash comedy that lets a legendary cast play against type and then lean into it with wicked delight: Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer turn domestic life into a contact sport, while Tommy Lee Jones anchors the chaos with deadpan authority. Luc Besson stages the whole thing with a slick, punchy rhythm, where small-town French calm keeps colliding with very American, very Mafia instincts—often funny, sometimes startling, always energetic. The movie’s secret weapon is its self-awareness: it knows the audience’s gangster-movie expectations and toys with them, letting the humor and the mayhem feed each other without needing to wink too hard. It is also loudly R-rated and happily violent, so if you want a gentle fish-out-of-water comedy, look elsewhere—but if you’re in the mood for dark laughs, big personalities, and a few showy set pieces, this one goes down easy.

The Family is clearly aiming for a fish-out-of-water gangster comedy where a mob clan tries (and fails) to behave in quiet French suburbia, with Luc Besson leaning into cartoonish violence and culture-clash gags. The problem is it can’t decide what it wants to be: the tone whipsaws between breezy sitcom bits and sudden brutal action, and the story feels like a string of subplots that never quite clicks into a satisfying whole. If you’re hoping for a tight crime caper, smart satire, or the kind of grounded De Niro mafia film this setup hints at, you’ll likely find it scattered and oddly paced. Still, De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer have fun with the material, and if you’re in the mood for a messy, high-energy R-rated romp rather than a coherent narrative, it’s watchable.