JANE AUSTEN'S MAFIA

US, 1998, 83 minutes, Colour.
Lloyd Bridges, Jay Mohr, Billie Burke, Christina Applegate, Pamela Gidley, Olympia Dukakis.
Directed by Jim Abrahams.

Writer-director Jim Abrahams was one of those responsible for the hilarious spoofs, the Flying High/Airplane series. He was also a participant in the Naked Gun series. Another of his films was Ruthless People. Here he offers a spoof of The Godfather and other Mafia films like Once Upon a Time in America. However, the whole thing is quite laboured, obvious in the parallels, with very corny jokes but not as fresh as those in Flying High.

Lloyd Bridges is the equivalent of Marlon Brando in The Godfather, Jay Mohr is the Al Pacino character. Christina Applegate is Diane Keaton. A lot of the film takes place in Sicily, not very amusingly, parodying the Robert de Niro sections of Godfather II. The film then leaps sixty years to a Once Upon a Time in America kind of scenario and then moves properly into The Godfather itself. Mainly there are parody characters, slapstick and farcical situations. It is not particularly funny nor particularly memorable as a spoof.