Prizzi's Honor (1985)


The blackest black comedy about the Mafia isn’t really funny enough. It’s very slow, too. Although Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner and Anjelica Huston are all charismatic, they don’t have the material to work with. I found it tiresome to watch and it lacked the thrills of a good gangster drama as well as the laughs of a wittier film. Some of the motivations were unclear, too: what was in it for Kathleen Turner’s character? She didn’t marry Jack Nicholson for the money (she was already rich) and she didn’t love him either (she tried to kill him).

It was densely plotted and confusingly signposted, so I lost the thread a few times.

The pale and frail Mafia don played by William Hickey was a ludicrous character, neither funny nor scary. You never knew how you were meant to feel about him, which may have been the point.

This film gained strong reviews and is generally regarded as a classic. I couldn’t see what the fuss was about.

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