The Family (2013)

Luc Besson's The Family arrives with a premise that promises friction and delivers farce. Robert De Niro plays Giovanni Manzoni, a mob informant parked in Normandy with his wife and children under FBI supervision, and the film's central joke is that Americans are loud and the French are rude. That is the whole of its cultural commentary. The antagonism is national, not racial. Nobody in the village is asked to reckon with anything larger than a snobbish grocer or a condescending math teacher. The cast, assembled from the usual Hollywood stock, is uniformly white, and the film shows no interest in that fact or any other.

Where the film gestures toward something like a social conscience, the gestures are faint and quickly abandoned. Michelle Pfeiffer's Maggie blows up a grocery store and later stabs a hitman, and Dianna Agron's Belle shoots two more, but this is the ordinary muscle of the genre, women with guns because the script wanted more guns. The tainted water subplot, involving a fertilizer factory, exists so De Niro can beat a plumber and destroy a pump. Environmental concern is not on the menu. Neither is economic grievance, though a scheming tradesman and a corrupt factory owner drift through the frame as minor villains. Nobody eats anything rich.

The culture clash material is played for laughs, and the laughs are limp. Besson stages a film club screening of Goodfellas, which is the closest the movie comes to an argument about anything, and the argument is that Martin Scorsese already made the better version of this picture. What we have, then, is a competent and thoroughly harmless piece of entertainment that holds no positions and advances no causes. A mob comedy that offends no one, instructs no one, and means nothing. In the ledger of cultural instruction, it is a blank page with a punchline.