“Who doesn’t love spaghetti?” asks New York State Trooper Ed Croswell (David Arquette) while on a date with single mother Natalie (Jennifer Esposito) in “Mob Town,” and the answer, according to Dan…
’s film, is no one. The traditional Italian dish figures prominently in this low-rent Mafia tale, which — based on an infamous gathering of top organized-crime bigwigs in remote upstate Apalachin, N.Y. — has been concocted with nothing but stale, clichéd ingredients. Clumsy in every respect, it’s an offer even die-hard genre fans will find easy to refuse.
Via introductory text cards and newspaper headlines, Abeckaser’s film lays out its premise: on Nov. 14, 1957, approximately 100 members of the Mafia, from all corners of the country, gathered at the Apalachin estate of Joe Barbara under the orders of Vito Genovese , who wanted to establish himself as the Luciano crime family’s boss of bosses in the wake of taking out rivals Frank Costello and Albert Anastasia.
“Mob Town” is the story of that incident, which closing text informs us compelled FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to finally admit in public that the Mafia existed. Unfortunately, Abeckaser’s action-deficient drama has nothing to add to these bookending facts, save for a wealth of corny plot points and even cornier acting. After a traffic stop of a noted cigar-chomping gangster, Croswell comes to suspect that the Mob may be up to no good in the area.
When not busy depicting Barbara’s grocery shopping, “Mob Town” expends undue energy on the budding relationship between Croswell and Natalie, the former played by Arquette with goofy, unconvincing single-mindedness, and the latter embodied by Esposito as a friendly cipher who dresses like a high-school girl.
“You think you’re in the movies or something?” crows Davi’s Genovese to an underling, but “Mob Town’s” wink-wink address of its own artificiality doesn’t excuse its inept execution, which extends to a stereotypical Italian score by Lionel Cohen. The fact that Croswell’s arrests didn’t lead to a single conviction only further undermines the film’s attempt to turn this historical footnote into something meaningful, or memorable.Reviewed online, Stamford, Conn., Dec. 12, 2019. MPAA Rating: R.
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