Welcome back to Movie Recaps. Today I will show you a comedy,
crime, thriller film from 2013, titled The Family. Spoilers ahead! Watch out and take care.
Mafia hitman Rocco murders an Italian family of four in cold blood believing them to be the
Manzoni. He cuts the finger off the father and sends it to mafia boss Don Lucchese,
who is currently in jail, but after testing the fingertips, they confirm Rocco killed the
wrong people, so he is ordered to keep looking. The real Manzoni family is leaving the USA to
live in Normandy, France under the FBI's witness protection program. There's the father, Giovanni,
who is also a mafia boss, his wife Maggie, his children Belle and Warren, and their dog,
Malavita. The reason why they are constantly moving and changing their names is Don Lucchese,
who many years ago tried to kill Giovanni for being his rival mafia boss.
Giovanni counter-attacked by snitching on him to the police, sending him to prison, and now
Lucchese's men are constantly looking for him for revenge. The family arrives at their new house
in the middle of the night. After turning on the power again and starting a fire, Giovanni pretends
to take a look around the property, but in truth, he takes out a body from his car trunk and buries
it in the backyard. The next morning, everybody gets ready to start a new day in their new lives.
Maggie goes to check out the town and see if there's anything interesting to do or see. Her
worst fears are confirmed by the waitress at the café she stops at though: this is a small
town and it has little to do in it. Then she goes to the convenience store to get groceries,
where she overhears the clerk and some clients insult Americans, thinking Maggie won't understand
them because they're speaking French. Furious, she grabs some alcohol and a gas tank from the shelves
and throws them in the storeroom before proceeding to light a match and throw it in there too. Then
she pays for her groceries pretty quickly, and leaves the market right before her trap explodes.
Afterward, she has lunch at a fast food place, where she gets people's shocked attention when
she makes too much noise drinking her soda; and then she visits the church, getting the chance to
befriend the priest. Belle and Warren go to their new school, and Warren quickly gets in trouble
with some bullies, who beat him up in the bathroom after he talks to them in a very smartypants,
sassy way. When lunchtime comes, he meets with his sister and tells her all the information
he's already learned about who is who in school because he's forming a plan to start a small
mafia group there. Once school is over, Belle begins to walk back home while a car with four
teenage boys follows her around, asking her to hang out with them. At first, Belle refuses,
but soon she gets lost in town and decides she may as well accept the ride. The boys however, instead
of taking her to her house, take her to a spot by the lake where teenagers usually hang out. Belle
asks them to take her home, but the leader tells her to stay and relax before lowering the strap of
her dress while his words are full of innuendo. Not willing to let them get away with this,
Belle returns to the car to grab a tennis racket and uses it to beat up the boy before telling the
others to behave more respectfully towards women. Then she takes the boy's car and drives it back to
her home. Meanwhile, Giovanni goes to the property gate to smoke a cigarette, which he isn't supposed
to do. He quickly notices there are FBI agents hidden nearby keeping an eye him, and decides to
go back inside to investigate the glass garden shed. After tossing a bunch of stuff out, he
finds a typewriter and, seeing as it still works, he thinks it's finally time for him to write his
memoir, describing how he took over the family business started by his grandfather decades ago.
When he stops to take a break, he meets his neighbor through their connected backyards,
and makes up a story about being a writer when he's asked what he does for a living. Later in
the evening, while the family is having dinner together, they're visited Robert Stansfield,
the FBI agent in charge of their case. After giving his approval of Giovanni's writer story,
he asks him about a shop owner that disappeared recently, and Giovanni tells him he doesn't know
anything about it, when actually, he killed him because he sold him some seafood that he
claimed was fresh but it was actually frozen - this is the body he had in the trunk when
he arrived. Stansfield reminds him not to get into trouble, and before leaving, he tells him that the
FBI agents that will be protecting him from the house across the street are Di Cicco and Mimmo.
Then Giovanni joins her wife in bed and has a nightmare about the barbecue party he threw many
years ago, which was the occasion Lucchese had chosen to strike. The following day,
when Giovanni gets too distracted by his writing, Maggie demands to know what he's writing about and
freaks out when she hears it's a memoir, since that could get them in big trouble. Then she
grabs a tray of food she's prepared specially for Di Cicco and Mimmo and leaves to take it
to them after asking Giovanni to check the tap water, because it comes out brown and the plumber
she's called won't show up. At school, Warren is starting to make contacts with the right people,
using information and stolen goods to get them to work for him. Belle,
on the other hand, had to beat up a girl in the bathroom for having stolen her pencil case.
She also sees a very handsome guy in the cafeteria, and Warren informs him that's Henri,
a college student acting as substitute teacher for Math class. All the girls in the school want him,
so Belle will have lots of competition if she wants to go after him, but she has a plan:
she approaches Henri after class and asks him for private Math lessons, which he accepts. Meanwhile,
Warren meets his bullies outside the school and proceeds to beat them all up with the help of the
contacts he's made. Back in the house, the plumber arrives over forty minutes late, irritating
Giovanni. His mood only gets worse when the man tries to unnecessarily change all the pipes in
his house, so Giovanni beats him up with the tools he finds in the basement and then puts the body in
the plumber's own van to take him to the hospital, where the doctor has trouble understanding how the
man's body could have so many fractured bones from simply falling down the steps. While Rocco
finds the family of the seafood shop owner and kills them all for not having information
about Giovanni, he continues to write his memoir, talking about how he used to take good care of his
old neighborhood back in Brooklyn. In the evening, Maggie scolds him for what he did to the plumber,
and Giovanni retaliates by reminding her of the explosion she caused at the convenience store.
Chatting about her fire obsession gets Giovanni excited, and the couple gets intimate right
there on the couch. When the weekend comes, the family throws a barbecue party and invites all
the neighbors, an idea they aren't very fond of but Stansfield insisted so they could integrate
themselves with the community better. Maggie asks Belle about this Henri guy she's invited and
reminds her to use protection, but Belle tells her not to worry because she won't be having a
quickie in some classroom: she'll choose the right time and place with the love of her life. Warren
then arrives with various bottles of soda and tells his mother to stop making French food and
to make American dishes instead because that's what the neighbors expect. Turns out he's right:
the neighbors have come to see the excentric yankees and are happy to eat their weird food.
Even Di Cicco and Mimmo are allowed to leave their watch room and join the fun.
The only one missing is Giovanni himself, who Belle finds in the garden shed. Writing his life
down like this has been like looking at himself in the mirror for hours, and he's realized he regrets
not having been a better father for his children and having put them in these tricky situations.
Belle however, doesn't agree and tells her she considers him the best dad in the world.
Now in a better mood, Giovanni joins the party, only to get irritated again when the neighbors
start trying to teach him how to start a grill fire. Giovanni imagines all the ways he could
torture them for being rude but thankfully, before he can do anything stupid, he's interrupted by the
recently arrived Stansfield. The two men talk in private, and Stansfield informs Giovanni that
people in the White House are worried about this book he's writing because it could get many people
in trouble, but Giovanni promises he's doing it for himself and doesn't plan to release it to the
public. He also tells him that Giovanni snitching on Lucchese has been the best advertising the FBI
has ever had, and nowadays, more and more members from Giovanni's old mafia gang are giving up
information in exchange for protection in order to live a safer life. At the end of the party, Belle
is disappointed that Henri didn't show up. The following day, Giovanni goes to see the mayor to
discuss the brown water problem. The man doesn't have a solution though, and Giovanni imagines
himself beating him up for it before leaving the office without creating any kind of trouble.
Next, he visits the water company, where he confirms the water already arrives dirty to
their reserves and one of the workers there gives him a clue behind the cause: a local fertilizer
factory. Giovanni visits that factory next, and when the boss proves to be unhelpful and rude,
Giovanni ties him to the back of his car and drags him down the road until he's ready to confess.
The man explains to him how to find the turbine he must deactivate to get clean water,
and now that he has the information he needs, Giovanni leaves him in the middle of the road
with his bike after promising to cut his balls if he ever tells anyone what happened.
When he returns home, he finds Stansfield reading his manuscript, who quite likes it
but still scolds Giovanni for writing it in the first place. Meanwhile, Maggie continues to visit
the church and the priest manages to convince her to do a confession with him after promising
her everything she tells him is confidential. The things she says are so disturbing however,
that they haunt the priest for a week and he forbids her from entering his church ever again.
At school, Warren has forgotten to write something for the school paper as he had promised,
so only having five minutes to hand something in, he ends up quoting Lucchese from the time he met
him as a boy. The newspaper passes from hand to hand all over the place, used to be read in the
plane or wrap things, and that's how it makes it to Lucchese's cell. The old man immediately
recognizes the quote and sends his men to Normandy to find Giovanni once and for all. After class,
Belle visits Henri at his classmate and they end up making love against the door after she locks
it. In the evening, Giovanni gets a call from one of the neighbors that came to the barbecue,
inviting him to a film event the community shares every month: they watch a movie and then discuss
it, and since next time they'll be watching an American classic, they want Giovanni there to
guide the debate with his expertise as a writer. Giovanni accepts, and since the FBI listens to
all his calls, Stansfield shows up minutes later to tell him what an awful idea it is.
Giovanni doesn't agree, he thinks this is a great way to show they're fitting in, and makes
Stansfield accept to come to the event with him. The following day, Warren's violent and criminal
activities are discovered by the school board, so he rushes back to the house to get some money and
fake documentation in order to escape to Paris and start his own illegal business there as his father
had done at thirteen. Before leaving, he says goodbye to his sister, who is depressed because
she's fallen in love with Henri but for him, she's only been a fling and now he's graduated,
he will live in Paris too. Giovanni leaves a doll on his seat so the FBI thinks that's him,
and sneaks out of the house to plant a bomb on the turbine that makes the water brown.
Afterward, he meets with Stansfield and together they go to the film event, where they discover
they'll be watching Goodfellas. Stansfield thinks this is even a worse idea now, but Giovanni points
out leaving before the movie starts is even more suspicious. After the movie is over,
Giovanni is asked to tell the audience about how accurate to real New York is, and Giovanni can't
help it anymore and starts telling stories about his life there as a mafia boss, which the people
present think it's fictional. Stansfield still doesn't approve though, and thinking Giovanni
is out of control, he calls Di Cicco and Mimmo to tell them to round up the family and begin plan B.
In the meantime, Warren is at the station, waiting to take the train to Paris, and Belle is
on the roof of a house while calling Henri on the phone, threatening to kill herself if he doesn't
take her back. At that moment, both siblings see a group of mafia hitmen arrive in town,
so they decide to go back to the house to warn their parents, especially after Warren tries
to call them and gets no response because Maggie couldn't get to the phone in time.
The hitmen kill everyone in the police station and use their records to find Giovanni's address,
they also kill the firefighters and cut the tires from the firetrucks.
While Maggie joins Di Cicco and Mimmo to ask about her children because they aren't home,
an explosion goes off in the city: it's the bomb Giovanni had planned, which he programmed
to explode right now so he could use the film event as an alibi. Stansfield drives him back
to his house and drops him there, warning him not to come out while he goes to talk to the police.
Maggie also wants to return home, but as soon as she steps outside, she sees the mysterious
men in black and goes back inside with Di Cicco and Mimmo, where she tries to call the house
but her husband won't pick up the phone. The hitmen arrive at the house and make it explode,
killing as well any neighbor that comes out to see what the noise is about. Luckily for Giovanni,
he survives thanks to hiding in the garden after hearing Malavita bark as an alert. Maggie wants
to go see him, but as soon as Di Cicco and Mimmo approach the door, they're instantly killed by one
of the hitmen that threatens to take advantage of Maggie before ending her. Giovanni arrives
at that very moment and jumps on the hitman, asphyxiating him from behind while Maggie looks
for a knife that she uses to stab their attacker for good. Meanwhile, while all the hitmen are
busy investigating the ruins of the house and arguing over if they should kill the dog or not,
Warren and Belle arrive and steal some of the hitmen's weapons from the trunks of their cars.
A gunfight ensues then, where Warren and Belle manage to kill most of the hitmen except for
Rocco. With Warren unconscious after getting hit by recoil, Belle leaves him on the ground
and starts running away, hoping Rocco having run out of bullets will work to her advantage. The
old man is surprisingly resilient though, and he chases after her until Stansfield suddenly shows
up and runs over him with his car. The hitmen may be all dead, but the family's identity has
been discovered, so they have to relocate to a new town with new names again. Giovanni however,
is happy that got to tell his story to a crowd, even if they all thought it was fake.