“Eat, Pray, Love” is so over — ladies, we’ve officially entered the “Threaten, Extort, Kill” era. This unusual new ethos of empowerment is the guiding theory behind Catherine Hardwicke’s crime comedy/feminist manifesto “Mafia Mamma,” starring Toni Collette as Kristin, a harried American mom and marketing exec who discovers her own power after she ascends to the top of an Italian crime family. Aretha Franklin sang a girl power anthem about “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” but what Kristin finds in Rome is a little “rispetto,” something she was sorely lacking in her previous life.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” and its subsequent film adaptation starring Julia Roberts looms large in “Mafia Mamma,” as Kristin and her best friend Jenny (Sophia Nomvete) fantasize about escaping to a land of gelato, pasta and Italian hunks after Kristin walks in on her dirtbag man-child husband Paul (Tim Daish) mid coitus with the school guidance counselor. The pair of pals put a crude twist on the book title, but the imagined sensual pleasures remain the same, inspiring Kristin to make a last-minute trip to Italy for the funeral of her estranged grandfather, Giuseppe Balbano (Alessandro Bressanello).
After the funeral turns into a shootout in the cobblestone streets of a medieval Italian village, Kristin is shocked to discover that her grandfather, a vintner of terrible wines, was in actuality, the Don of the Balbano crime family, and he has selected her as his replacement. A 40-something mom in sensible sneaks as a Mafia Donna? It’s a premise ripe for fish-out-of-water comedy, out of which Collette and Hardwicke wring every last drop.
