Mafia Inc.: A Solid Montreal Gangster Drama That Breaks New Heads If Not New Ground

Liam Lacey

Rating: B

I recently received an invitation from an American publicist to review a Canadian movie I hadn’t heard of, Mafia Inc. 

It turns out the movie, which is opening in the United States this week, was released by Entertainment One in Canada a year ago. But it was seen in only a few theatres in English Canada, where it appears to have gone all but unreviewed.

That’s a shame, because it’s a story well worth watching. Fortunately, Mafia Inc. is already available for rent on ITunes.ca or watchable on the French pay channel,  Super Écran, which you can subscribe to via CraveTV.ca. 

Sergio Castellitto is Montreal mobster Frank Paterno who needs $180 million fast in Mafia Inc.

While the gangster genre over the past 50 years has been the specialty of Italian-American auteurs (Coppola, Scorsese,  DePalma and The Sopranos’ David Chase), Mafia Inc., directed by  Quebec director Daniel Grou (a.k.a. “Podz”), stands up surprisingly well. 

Grou, who moves between feature crime films (7 Days, L’Affaire Dumont) and episodic television (Vikings), honours the conventions of the crime family saga with visual style and vividly-drawn characters. 

The screenplay by Sylvain Guy - inspired by André Cédilot and André Noël’s non-fiction book, Mafia Inc. The Long Bloody Reign of Canada’s Sicilian Clan - is a classic dynastic drama with criminal sibling rivalry, sprawling international connections,  and splashes of theatrically gruesome (though not gratuitous) violence  

For anyone weary of the New Yawk and Joisey goombah tropes, it’s refreshing watching these sharp-dressed mobsters, fluently switching between Quebec French, English and Sicilian Italian.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

 The film begins, in the early ‘90s, and the smoothly ruthless Francesco “Frank” Paterno (Sergio Castellitto),  has a game-changing big plan: He’s creating a consortium to build a toll bridge between Sicily and Calabria on the Italian mainland. This venture will allow him to launder vast amounts of drug money and make a fortune in kickbacks. 

But Frank needs $180 million to start, and he’s moving money between off-shore accounts, while settling expensive turf wars between his distributors, rival ethnic and motorcycle gangs, and discovering financial regularities among his accountants.

On the domestic front, there’s angry competition brewing between his perpetually-aggrieved son, Giaco (Donny Falsetti) and Frank’s’ apparent successor, the smirking, loose cannon, Vince Gamache (Marc-André Grondin), the son of the Paterno family’s longtime tailor, Henri (Gilbert Sicotte). 

Vince is the outsider who has pushed his way in and fails to grasp that only certain kinds of psychotic violence are acceptable with in the Mafia code. His most horrible venture, introduced in the opening scene, involves arranging for the death of a busload of Venezuelan school boys as part of a grisly drug trafficking scheme.

Not that the mobsters are fastidious about these things. Permissible violence, in contrast, includes the misuse of meatpacking equipment and an unfortunate character with the foreshadowing nickname of “Yap Yap.” 

To complicate things, Giaco’s softer, younger brother, Patrizio (Mike Ricci) is engaged to Vince’s sister, Sofie (Mylène Mackay), who’s studying for her MBA. Beneath her respectable power-flirt exterior, Sofie has the same ruthless instincts as her prospective mobster-in-laws. 

Women here are carefully separated into two groups; the waitresses, strippers and hookers who serve as entertainment, and the fierce older wives, who take no crap from their crime-boss husbands.

There’s much here that’s familiar — the weddings, the funerals, cruelty, betrayals the blood-puddled streets — though this isn’t really a knock when a film is also consistently watchable, even, sometimes, through parted fingers.

Mafia Inc. Directed by Daniel Grou. Written by Sylvain Guy. Starring: Sergio Castellitto, Marc-André Grondin, Gilbert Sicotte, Mylène Mackay, Donny Falsetti. Mafia Inc. is available through iTunes, Apple TV and on Super Écran.