Metacritic reviews

The Family is the rare breed of pitch-black comedy that effectively uses violence for laughs or gasps, depending on the situation.

You can be chuckling one minute then cowering and cringing the next, which tinges the humor with apprehension and taints the brutality with absurdity. That isn't to say that the combo doesn't work at all.

The movie has holes galore. It has abrupt tonal shifts, an incoherent back story and abandoned subplots. It doesn’t even try for basic credibility. But buoyed by hot performances, it sustains a zapping electrical energy.

Besson aims his movie at anyone who’s ever held a grudge at an ill-mannered French waiter or clerk (haughty, and by the way, they’d NEVER condescend to speak to you in English). If that includes you, The Family has serves up a little wish-fulfillment payback, with a baseball bat.

The Family is a fish-out-of-water/buddy comedy/Mob flick. But most of all, it's a missed opportunity.

Robert De Niro – wait for it – in the role of a mobster. Now there's an original idea.

The film is curiously joyless and inert.

The Family is ultimately a headache, nearly two hours of baseball bat beatings and dull witticisms, with zero inventiveness or energy.

A film whose only distinguishing characteristic is how big a mess it makes of its already meager ambitions.

It’s too bad we can’t take a hit out on The Family. This unexciting, unfunny would-be action satire is filled with Italian-American stereotypes, decades-old TV-style Mafia cliches, bits of business that never amount to anything and actors so much better than the hoary, one-joke material.