MAFIA! (Touchstone) Starring: Jay Mohr, Billy Burke, Christina Applegate, Pamela Gidley, Lloyd Bridges. Screenplay: Jim Abrahams, Greg Norberg and Michael McManus. Producer: Bill Badalato. Director: Jim Abrahams. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (adult humor, profanity, slapstick violence) Running Time: 85 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
MAFIA!, like its predecessors AIRPLANE!, THE NAKED GUN and HOT SHOTS!, is a scorecard comedy. Their goal has always been to throw as many puns, sight gags, movie parodies and bodily function gags onto the screen as 90 minutes could hold, operating on the premise that you gotta keep swinging if you wanna get hits. At the end of the film, a viewer's reaction is likely to be a subconscious evaluation of the jokes' batting average. If hits exceed whiffs, everybody wins; if whiffs exceed hits, not so much.
At the risk of strangling the life out of this particular metaphor, Jim Abrahams' MAFIA! has two strikes against it before it even shows up at the ballpark, the first and most obvious being its satiric target. MAFIA! is a parody of gangster films, particularly the GODFATHER films, with Jay Mohr starring in the Michael Corleone-esque role of Anthony Cortino, a war hero who returns home to join up with the crime family headed by his father Vincenzo (Lloyd Bridges). Most of the situations and characters are pure GODFATHER -- Anthony's hot-headed older brother Joey (Billy Burke), his WASP girlfriend Diane (Christina Applegate), flashbacks to the Cortinos' arrival and rise to power in America -- which seems like a ripe enough source for parody until you realize that the films in question came out when the average 1998 movie-goer was just a pair of gametes and a dream. Entrenched though the films and their situations may be in the cinematic canon, MAFIA! just feels stale, as topical as a Joey Buttafuoco joke or a reference to Bella Abzug's hats.
At least the GODFATHER films will be well-known to most average viewers, though. The other major reference points are Martin Scorsese's mob-themed films GOODFELLAS and CASINO. The number of gags baed on the latter film, including the opening credits sequence and the character of Pepper (Pamela Gidley, a dead ringer for Sharon Stone), is utterly baffling given CASINO's less-than-spectacular box office performance. References to more recent, more familiar films like FORREST GUMP and THE ENGLISH PATIENT draw big chuckles, while the CASINO references draw mostly blank stares. Touchstone was obviously concerned about being too obscure when they changed the title from JANE AUSTEN'S MAFIA! (though curiously that title still appears on-screen), but no one gave nearly as much thought to the actual content of the film.
The second strike is the "trailer factor," which is always a danger with a broad comedy like MAFIA! Since virtually none of the jokes are contextual, and 90% of them can be conveyed in a matter of moments, the people who put together theatrical trailers and television spots are free to plunder the film for all the best laughs. It's easy to pull 120 seconds worth of "A" material from MAFIA!, sight gags like a shattering poodle and an overweight ersatz River-dancer, but you're sadly mistaken if you think that's a representative sample. If you've seen that theatrical trailer for MAFIA!, with its two-minute barrage of great bits, you've probably laughed about as hard as you're going to laugh at the whole 85 minues of the film.
Comedies like MAFIA! are usually entertaining just for forcing you to pay attention. Dozens of decent laughs hover around the perimeter of the frame, while several of the best moments come during the closing credits, including a great riff on the standard "no animals were harmed during the making of this film" disclaimer. It's the jokes Abrahams places front and center which drop with a thud just a bit too often. As just one example of the lackluster writing, the "Guess What Number I'm Thinking Of" table in one casino scene is a joke swiped from VEGAS VACATION...and VEGAS VACATION did it better. Abrahams offers plenty of moments worth a snicker or a grin, but ultimately that laugh scorecard just doesn't come out in his favor. He came to the plate with a 25-year-old bat, and showed all his best swings in batting practice. For those of you scoring at home, that doesn't add up to winning offense.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 mediocrefellas: 5.
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