101 min | R | April 14, 2023 | Bleecker Street
A widowed American mom flies to Italy for a funeral and inherits the family business. The family business is the Mafia. The movie thinks that sentence is the whole joke.
Kristin is a Los Angeles woman whose career stalls and whose marriage collapses on the same bad day. A phone call from Italy summons her to her estranged grandfather’s funeral. The grandfather ran a crime family, and his dying wish installs Kristin as the new Don. The film wants to be a fish-out-of-water comedy about a nice American discovering ruthlessness inside herself. What it actually is, is a string of Italian stereotypes stapled to a fempowerment arc that the script never earns.
Toni Collette plays Kristin with full commitment to bits that the screenplay refuses to support. She gags at a gunshot, vomits on cue, and stumbles into violence by accident, and Collette sells each beat with more conviction than it deserves. Monica Bellucci plays Bianca, the family consigliere, as a cold operator who delivers exposition and arches an eyebrow. Bellucci is given attitude instead of a character. Alessandro Bressanello appears as Don Giuseppe Balbano in flashback, and Eduardo Scarpetta plays Fabrizio as a romantic prospect whose purpose the film keeps changing. The actors work hard. The roles work against them.
Catherine Hardwicke directs from a script by J. Michael Feldman and Debbie Jhoon, and the result swings between slapstick gore and sincere widow-finds-herself drama without ever choosing one. The Tuscan locations get postcard cinematography that flattens the comedy into a tourism reel. A vineyard shootout stages its kills for splatter laughs, then cuts to a tender wine-tasting scene as if the two tones belong in the same movie. The editing rushes the setups and lingers on the punchlines that miss. The score underlines every joke in case the audience cannot locate it.
This is a film built on a single premise that it mistakes for a screenplay. Kristin’s transformation from doormat to crime boss happens because the plot requires it, not because the story builds it. The violence is too broad to land as satire and too cartoonish to carry stakes. Hardwicke and her cast have the ingredients for a comedy about a woman seizing power, but the movie keeps reaching for the easy stereotype instead of the harder joke.