Jane Austen's Mafia! (1998)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

"Airplane!" was new and topical. Disaster movies proliferated in the 1970s, especially those set on airplanes. But "Airplane!" was more than a joke-a-minute spoof. Its vision was scattershot, taking in several genres; and it was more-than-a-joke-a-minute. "Airplane!" threw jokes out wildly. Some failed, but another would be along any moment. No one had made a movie like that since the Marx Brothers, and their work often plays too slow today, because the Marxes tested their jokes before live audiences (in the day before everyone had recording tools or an internet) and they left spaces after the good jokes for laughs that are simply leaden on television.But "Airplane!" and its successors (especially "Police Squad" and its "Naked Gun" franchise spinoffs and the "Hot Shots" movies) led viewers to nestle into our seat expecting to be bowled over from laughs. It was an impossible feat to keep up. "Airplane!" hit the screens in 1980. "Mafia!" (or "Jane Austen's Mafia!" after a rash of Jane Austen flicks) shyly poked its head out in 1998, long enough for viewers to be born and grow up on this humor, and pay for their own tickets to "the next one." Had this movie come out twenty years earlier, when the "Godfather" movies were fairly new and topical, it might have been acclaimed the comedy of the year. Now, it seems like too little (too few jokes) far too late. We have a feeling we've seen it all before.Frankly, as someone who was 18/19 in 1980, when this sort of humor was new, I've grown tired of scatological humor, probably having seen too much of it. Beyond that, the film looks great! The "Godfather II" spoof of the early life of Don Cortino is spot-on, and it's good to see children treated with disrespect. It's the sort of hallmark we've come to expect from Abrahams.Lloyd Bridges (in, unfortunately for us, his last filmed role) plays Cortino as an adult, and "The Godfather"-spoof shots are recreated in loving detail. However, for comic effect (and here's a spoiler), the shooting scene goes on too long, and once started it gets old quickly (though the "Say hello to my little friend" line from "Scarface" was welcome).The rest of the movie follows "The Godfather" and "Godfather II" a little too closely. They needed more silly digressions of the "Airplane!" type. And are there enough jokes, or are we viewers too demanding? Are Abrahams' movies like a drink addiction, where we have to have more and more swigs of it to have the same effect?In any case, it's a long-delayed spoof of gangland movies, but it didn't have the same devastating effect "Airplane!" had on disaster movies by highlighting their innate silliness. Most gangland movies are, at bottom, pretty dumb. Perhaps Abrams and his writers never found the true essence of stupidity at their core and wound up degenerating into a series of pratfalls, as happened with the later "Pink Panther" movies.Lloyd Bridges also tumbled into the snare Leslie Nielsen found. Originally chosen for "Airplane!" because they had never done a funny thing on camera in their lives, playing po-faced versions of their normally straight-laced characters, they leaned more and more on mugging in their later comedy roles, trying to look stupid as well as say illogical lines. It's too bad Peter Sellers died before Abrahams' movies hit the screen. The best slapstick movie comedian since the silent days, Sellers would have felt right at home.So whether Abrahams simply didn't find "The Godfather" and its successors as innately foolish as disaster movies (where's the counterpart to "who didn't have fish for dinner" line?) or whether we as his loyal audience are simply looking for more jokes than a single movie can bear, or whether by 1998 the Farrelly brothers had the hot new thing going ("There's something About Mary" wsa released in the same year as "Mafia!") there's a feeling "Mafia!" simply isn't as much as it could be. That's too bad because it's a good idea, and because "Godfather" sets, clothing and hairstyles are beautifully recreated.

If you go into this, not expecting something other than a parody of the mid 80s to mid 90s, you will be disappointed. Yes, the main parody is of the Godfather, but that's not it. Most of the bad reviews seem to be because of what was missed in the Godfather,and how that could of been so much better, but that's not what the film is only about.Tou cant stop at the Godfather, there are so many other movies and cultural items that are referenced,most of the top blockbusters of the time. the writer is a genius for how it all fits together. i watched this with a few friends and everyone's stomach hurt at the end from laughing so hard

Jim Abrahams has written several of my favorite fast-paced comedies, like "Hot Shots" and "The Naked Gun", and of course my favorite "Airplane!". This was the first movie that i felt it was obvious he was losing his touch. The comedy is not as fast-paced here as it was before, nor is it as spot-on. Spoofing the "Godfather"-movies shouldn't be very hard really. Those movies are as potentially silly as great movies always are, walking the thin line that greatness is.The problem here is that i think they missed so many things that could have been spoofed, and they included some things that didn't need spoofing. The best part of the movie in my opinion is the one with the young Cortino coming to America. The more contemporary parts are less funny and more silly. Mostly i find it to be a lack in the script department as both Lloyd Bridges and Jay Mohr are pretty suitable for their parts.In the end this is about 50 percent embarrassing and 50 percent funny, much like many of Leslie Nielsens later movies. It's far from "Hot Shots" and "Naked Gun" but then again such comedy is not what it was.

This movie was offensive to Italians and Italian-Americans everywhere, using stereotypes in a cheap attempt at lowbrow humor. At least a show like The Sopranos (which trades in the same negative stereotyping) attempts to make social commentary about the human condition. This movie is not smart, not funny, and not classy.Clearly, all ethnic groups are stereotyped in the popular media. It's an unfortunate fact of life in Hollywood that writers use easy stereotypes as a way to quickly tell a story.The fact is that FBI statistics show that less than 1/10 of 1 percent of the approximately 25 million Italian-Americans in this country are involved in organized crime. These statistics also show that Italian-Americans are one of the least-arrested ethnic groups in this country for any sort of crime. Yet, the mafia and criminal stereotype of Italians still thrives.Respected columnist Jack Newfield once wrote that, "Prejudice against Italian-Americans is the most tolerated intolerance... (There is a) long tradition of Italian bashing." And Hollywood screenwriter and Broadway playwright John Patrick Shanley said in a Time Magazine interview that Italian-Americans "are the last ethnic group America can comfortably mock." Please don't waste your time with this movies.