It’s the Law (2017)
Directed by Salvatore Ficarra
No — It’s the Law is not woke, scoring 0 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
It has been a quiet season at the classification desk, and then a Sicilian comedy arrives to remind us that not every film with a thesis is a sermon.
Consciousness Markers
The film carries a mild satirical moral about the difficulty of enforcing legality, but it delivers this through farce and cynicism rather than preachy sermonizing.
The cast is entirely Italian, drawn from the Sicilian comedy tradition of Ficarra e Picone; there is no diversity-conscious casting agenda at work.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film.
The film is a male-buddy political satire with no feminist framing or gender-conscious commentary.
The satire concerns civic corruption and legality in a homogeneous Sicilian town; race is not a subject of the film.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
The film critiques mafia corruption and petty civic rule-breaking, not capitalism or wealth inequality; there is no eat-the-rich framing.
No body-positivity themes or commentary on body image appear.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are present.
The film is a fictional satire with no historical revisionism.
Why it received this score
It has been a quiet season at the classification desk, and then a Sicilian comedy arrives to remind us that not every film with a thesis is a sermon. It's the Law concerns Pietrammare, a small town that elects an honest professor as mayor, only to discover that his program of legality produces fines, taxes, and a populace in open revolt. Salvo and Valentino, played by the directors themselves, run an illegal kiosk attached to their bar. When the new order shuts it down, they pivot to defaming the mayor. The farce is tight, the cynicism is Sicilian, and the cast is drawn entirely from the regional comic tradition, with no external casting agenda pressed upon it.
Those hoping for a broader indictment will find the film remarkably narrow in its targets. Its villain is corruption, both the organized kind and the ordinary kind practiced by neighbors who park where they like and build where they shouldn't. There is no critique of wealth as such, no environmental lament, no gendered reading of power, no meditation on the body or the mind. The town is homogeneous and the film treats it as such. Instead it offers an argument about the cost of virtue, which is a very old argument and predates any contemporary vocabulary by several centuries.
The moral arrives through farce and a shrug, not through a lecture. The film proposes that legality is difficult to enforce and unpopular to defend, then lets its characters behave badly until the credits roll. That is a modest instruction, delivered with a smirk and a raised eyebrow. We log it accordingly, note the faint residue of civic instruction, and wait for the next vintage to be uncorked.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
A small Sicilian town elects a new, honest major but quickly learns that playing by the rules is not as easy as it seems.
Questions about It’s the Law
Is It’s the Law woke?
No — It’s the Law is not woke, scoring 0 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does It’s the Law have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Lecture Energy at 12.
How does It’s the Law compare to other 2017 movies?
It ranks #281 of the 309 films from 2017 we've scored; their average is 19. The wokest is I Am Not Your Negro (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.