Rating: R | Runtime: 101 minutes
Release Date: April 14th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Bleecker Street Media
Director(s): Catherine Hardwicke
Writer(s): J. Michael Feldman & Debbie Jhoon / Amanda Sthers (story)

You look like a librarian in a library, not a porno.

Can someone get Catherine Hardwicke a good script? Anyone? I’m not Italian, but I can’t imagine that J. Michael Feldman and Debbie Jhoon’s screenplay for Mafia Mamma isn’t at least partially offensive in its stereotypical depiction of Italians constantly spitting when saying the name of someone they hate or becoming homicidal whenever someone says they never saw The Godfather.

You must wonder if Amanda Sthers’ original story was buried under a stack of papers in the 1990s and recently unearthed by producers who haven’t seen a comedy since. The whole thing literally hinges on the dated play-on-words of “Eat, Pray, Fuck.” Kristin (Toni Collette) is sick of her misogynist boss and cheating husband with no one to keep her invested in her life now that her son left for college. So, why not head to Italy for some oat sowing?

The answer: because accepting Bianca’s (Monica Bellucci) invitation to attend her grandfather’s funeral involuntarily means also accepting the late patriarch’s wish of inheriting the family business—the family mob business. It therefore becomes more “Eat, Pray, Survive” now that the rival Romano family smells blood in the water.

Everyone believes it’s open season because an American woman has taken over. Even Kristin’s loose cannon of a second cousin (Eduardo Scarpetta’s Fabrizio) believes it and strives to take the crown for himself. It’s not like she wants it anyway. All Kristin desires is a night alone with the hot Italian she met at the airport (Giulio Corso’s Lorenzo) to put her old life in the rearview. Doing so just isn’t that easy when everyone is trying to kill you.

It’s a generically familiar concept with a fish-out-of-water proving (accidentally or not) to be the perfect person for a high pressure, dangerous job. Luck plays a big role in keeping her alive at first, but rage and clarity soon follow as all the chauvinism Kristin has let rule her life finally comes into focus at a time when she’s her most confident and ruthless as far as turning the tables.

Collette is having a blast with the character’s rapid shifts from serious businesswoman to smiling hostess, but it’s all so predictable. You might not know who some people will reveal themselves to be, but you will definitely know they aren’t who they say. Everything and everyone are thus pawns waiting to expose his/her secret or die so someone else can. And we’re meant to not care about such contrivances because Kristin’s need for gnocchi and sex trumps all.

So, we watch the uninteresting gunplay and stomach the machismo of big men with heavy accents pausing to earnestly appreciate a good bag of Costa Rican snacks. We pretend like we don’t know Fabrizio isn’t drawn like a cartoon so that he can betray them all in the end or that Lorenzo isn’t the perfect romantic interest so he can become someone else.

It’s a front-to-back game of belief suspension that simply isn’t funny or entertaining enough to not get bored when those obvious revelations take too long to come to fruition. Even Bellucci is wasted in a side role meant to do little but show Kristin what she might become with self-worth. They may be written like caricatures, but Alfonso Perugini and Francesco Mastroianni are the lone bright spots as Kristin’s silly bodyguards. The rest is just lowest common denominator hijinks in a Hollywood-approximation-of-Italian package.

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Toni Collette in MAFIA MAMMA; courtesy of Bleecker Street.