14 | April | 2023 | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

The problem with the new movie “Mafia Mamma” is that there is a very involved attempt to make a movie about a woman from the United States who has been appointed the head of a Mafia family in Italy funny, and almost all of these attempts fail miserably. There is nothing worse than sitting through 2 hours of a mostly bad movie, waiting for something to be funny and it never happens.

The respected actress Toni Collette, plays Kristen, an ordinary housewife who is sending her son off to college and is about to get divorced from her cheating husband who works at a local Starbucks. She gets a call from a woman in Italy and finds out that not only has her grandfather just died, but for some unknown (and this makes no sense) reason, he wants her to take over his Mafia business. Some of these ideas are good, unfortunately, any attempts at making this idea funny, almost always fail- the cardinal sin for any comedy movie – is that it is not funny.

Other problems with this film are some way too gross fight scenes where someones eye is removed with a high heel. This is way over the top for a violent action movie and has no place in any movie trying to be a comedy.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for Mafia Mamma is a very low 23%, with my rating around 35% and a solid pass on this one.

In 1973, 50 years ago, the movie “The Exorcist” was released in theaters. Ever since this one-of-a-kind, game-changing film was released (causing moviegoers to run away and actually faint in the theaters), there have been so many Exorcist films trying to take advantage of the exceptional quality and name recognition of the original film. All of these movies have failed to capture the true horror created by the original. There will be a sequel to “The Exorcist” released in October 2023 and only because the author of the book William Peter Blaty co-wrote the screenplay and Ellen Burstyn will reprise her original role as Chris MacNeil – there is some hope that this new Exorcist just might be worthy of the original.

As far as this new movie “The Pope’s Exorcist” the only thing scary about this film, once again about demon possession, is to witness how far the acting career of Russel Crowe has fallen, since its peak in 2000 when he won the Oscar for “Gladiator” and should have won the Oscar in 2002 for “A Beautiful Mind”. During the filming of A Beautiful Mind with Ron Howard in 2001, there was news that Crowe was difficult to work with. Possibly this is the reason why he is never been close to getting great roles like these ever again. This new movie is nothing more than a bad B movie, about the same thing – trying to make money from a great film that was released 50 years ago.

The young Spanish boy who was possessed in this movie looked more like a puppet than a human being. The makeup was bad as was the entire story, which meandered all over the place and included a bad ending.

Why or how could Russel Crowe read this poor script and agree to make this film is a mystery, even despite the downturn in his acting career. This is one movie that will be out of the theaters in a little over a week from now.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for The Pope’s Exorcist are too high 49% with my rating at only 20% and a big miss. Wait for the new exorcist sequel to come out in October and miss this bad film.