Murder as Comedy?

We wanted to go to the movies.  The selection, however, was not encouraging.  There were 18 movies showing in town.  Of these, we had already seen two—The Butler and Blue Jasmine—and most of another, Planes (which our grandchildren tired of about halfway through, when the popcorn was gone).  The remaining 15 options were:

·      An action thriller about two government agents who find themselves on the run from a drug lord.

·      A youth movie in which the main character is enlisted to fight a super-criminal.

·      A futuristic thriller about a time when the rich live in space, leaving the poor to struggle back on Earth.

·      Another action thriller about a racecar driver whose wife is kidnapped.

·      A bio-pic about the martial arts guru who trained Bruce Lee.

·      The story of “a haunted family” that is “dangerously connected to the spirit world.”

·      A sci-fi flick about a woman who learns that “she descends from a line of warriors who protect our world from demons.”

·      A 3-D action epic about five people who rise from humble beginnings to perform on the “X-Factor.”

·      A mythic film about Greek gods who try to restore their “dying safe haven.”

·      A sci-fi action thriller in which the main character is “left for dead on a sun-scorched planet.”

·      The tale of a drug dealer who invents a fake family to facilitate a major shipment of illegal drugs.

·      A drama about a family who “comes under attack at a wedding anniversary getaway” by a “gang of mysterious killers.”

·      TWO buddy movies about hung-over drunks who confront the apocalypse.

·      A “comedy” about a mob family in witness protection program in France.

We decided to see The Family—the movie about the mob family hiding in France.  It had an a-list cast, led by Robert DeNiro, Michelle Pfieffer, Tommy Lee Jones.  It was billed by IMBD as an action crime comedy.  Critic Sheila O’Malley noted:

The Family" is a pretty uneven film, lurching from comedy to violence to sentiment, but it's best when it sticks in the realm of flat-out farce. The pleasure comes in watching the actors (Michelle Pfeiffer, in particular) submitting wholeheartedly to ridiculous situations. http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-family-2013

Perhaps the problem is that we went when the D.C. Naval Yard massacre was still fresh in the news.  The farce was not with me.   I knew, for instance, that, when the Michelle Pfeiffer character bombs a grocery store where she has been insulted, it was supposed to be funny as she walked away ahead of the explosion (which would have killed at least three people).   It wasn’t funny or farcical.  It was, simply, a family of sociopaths killing people right and left or being responsible for the deaths of mostly innocent people whose only crime was to be in their path.  Almost everyone gets killed, except the sociopaths who drive the plot.  Given that, in the real world, eleven people had just died in D.C. for being in the way of a sociopath, I could not find a funny moment in The Family.  I left feeling disgusted that our society has come to the point where we are supposed to laugh at this sort of thing.  The only saving grace to the film was the subplot about the family’s daughter, who says at one point, as she considers suicide after being jilted by her teacher/lover, “Love was my escape.”