TRAILER?-The Family? movie review

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(nydailynews) It?s too bad we can?t take a hit out on ?The Family.?

This unexciting, unfunny would-be action satire is filled with Italian-American stereotypes, decades-old TV-style Mafia cliches, bits of business that never amount to anything and actors so much better than the hoary, one-joke material.

The trigger for the movie?s plot is basically ?American mobster relocates to French village.? Co-writer-director Luc Besson (?La Femme Nikita,? ?The Professional?) doesn?t deepen things beyond that and even seems bored by the mayhem he feels obliged to deliver. So this is just ?The Whole Nine Yards? with croissants.

Dianna Agron and John D'Leo play Robert De Niro's children in

Dianna Agron and John D?Leo play Robert De Niro?s children in ?The Family.?

Robert De Niro is Giovanni, a Brooklyn hood whose grandfather was a driver for Vito Genovese and whose father was at the Apalachin Meeting in 1957. But Gio has turned rat ? we never learn why ? so he, wife Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer), son Warren (John D?Leo) and daughter Belle (Dianna Agron) are in hiding. Their witness protection overseer, Stansfield (a sleepy-looking Tommy Lee Jones), warns against any brouhahas when the family arrives in Normandy from the Riviera.

Though not new at this, Gio, using the name Fred, is caught off-guard by a neighbor and stammers that he?s a writer. He is indeed tapping out his memoirs, except when he gets irked at the village?s brown water and blows up a septic tank. As for Maggie, when she?s peeved at provincial French anti-Americanism, she sets off a bomb in a grocery store. Seventeen-year-old Belle stupidly accepts a ride from boys, then has to pummel them. And 14-year-old Warren plays the angles in his new school to extort the locals.

But Stansfield still wants them to assimilate. So Gio and Maggie host a barbecue for the whole town, as Belle loses her virginity to a teacher because, well, c?est la vie. A preposterous coincidence allows the boss Gio squealed on to figure out his whereabouts, and he sends a crew of black-hatted, black-suited foot soldiers to make sure Gio?s family sleeps with the fishes.

Robert De Niro with Tommy Lee Jones as his witness protection overseer in "The Family."

Besson makes a big show of being besotted by gangster life, so at one point Gio talks to the local film club after it screens ?Goodfellas? ? a strange meta-moment that only gets snickers because that great film?s co-star, De Niro, is in this one. (?Goodfellas? director Martin Scorsese is a producer here.) We barely get Gio?s take on mob morals since le hack Besson cuts to unthrilling shootouts and cutesy reaction shots of the family dog.

De Niro, still able to surprise us (as in ?Silver Linings Playbook?), could play Gio in his sleep, yet appears to be itching for something meatier. He and Pfeiffer ? now as ever one of the great screen beauties ? have a nice scene as they canoodle on a couch. Other than that, her ?dese-dems-doze? accent grates and he looks tired. As their kids, D?Leo is scrappy, though ?Glee?s? Agron is miscast.

There?s nothing here that feels original, as we wait for the other shoe to drop. ?The Family? is to ?Goodfellas? ? or any other good mobster flick ? as egg noodles and ketchup are to spaghetti and marinara sauce .

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