Mafia!

Despite having, at the very least, one gag in every frame, Jim Abrahams's Mafia! (whose title remains Jane Austen's Mafia on the screen) won't make you laugh so hard that you actually miss jokes, as with his and the Zucker brothers' Airplane! and The Naked Gun. Still, as they say in family circles, he's put a hit out. From the opening credits, a goofy parody of De Niro's character suspended in flames at the beginning of Casino, this movie has fun with 'em all: The Godfather, GoodFellas, even a little Il postino. Abrahams's standby, Lloyd Bridges, in his last role, is brilliantly and affectionately out to lunch as the Mafia boss; the rest of the cast (including Jay Mohr as the boss's son and Christina Applegate as the WASP girlfriend) play it straight and solid. Abrahams doesn't poke fun at the genre's clichés so much as he just copies scenes (the result is the film looks really good), and, perhaps sensing the mood of the day, he falls back a little too much on grossout humor. Still, at this movie's heart is an intelligent goofiness, parlayed through clever ideas ("Everybody dies, but in the Mafia people die more often") and terrible puns (the Forrest Gump parody is shameless). As for the terrific sight gags, giving them away might be more criminal than anything's the Mafia's ever done.

-- Mark Bazer