Mafia Mamma review – Toni Collette sells wacky empty-nester mob comedy hard

Unfortunately even her talents cannot save perfunctory tale of a discontented American woman who inherits an Italian crime family

Not even the fierce wattage of Toni Collette’s talent can light up this hokey crime comedy, a kind of wacky mobster spin on the idea of the unhappy American woman finding herself and learning to love again in a luxury Euro-tourist paradise; Mafia Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, perhaps. It’s directed by Catherine Hardwicke from a story idea by French author and film-maker Amanda Sthers, who gave us Madame – another film into which Collette tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to breathe some life.

Here she plays Kristin, an empty-nester whose son has just gone away to college; she is bored and unfulfilled by her job as a big pharma PR, and her husband turns out to be a cheating slimeball. Then she receives news that her Italian grandfather has just died on his Lazio estate bequeathing her full control of his “winery” business. Intrigued and in need of a change of scene, Kristin hops on the next flight to Italy and even at the airport has a flirtatious encounter with a hunky pasta-maker called Lorenzo (Guilio Corso). But when a shootout breaks out at her grandfather’s funeral, Kristin learns the awful truth: she has inherited a crime family.