Prizzi's Honor Reviews

It's so tasteful and tongue in cheek, that characters even play with dialogues in their mouths. Old Hickey best of all, but Nicholson is great and wife Anjelica is great too, phrasing the title to provoque grandfather Prizzi. Turner can't compete with them, bus os coherent with her foreing background. Evil and love are endogamic with the Prizzis.

Before watching this flick, I had some rather high expectations. I mean, with such a cast (Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner, Anjelica Huston) and such a prestigious director (John Huston), I was expecting something rather brilliant, I mean, even Roger Ebert was really enthousiast about it. Unfortunately, I didn't really like it. I mean, the cast was really good, especially Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner but I didn't like much the tone of the whole thing. It tries to be a dark comedy and mixes some romantic comedy elements with traditional maffia stuff but I thought the whole thing was rather uneven. Above all, I never really laughed during the whole duration and it is never a good sign when you are watching a comedy. Don't misunderstand me, it is not bad at all, Nicholson and Turner were both very good and perfectly cast and there were numerous interesting supporting characters but I just didn't care much about the plot. Still, in spite of its flaws, it remains a decent comedy and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

So much of John Huston’s career was a series of big-ideas dramatic films about groups of people banding together and forming a kind of destructive alliance, that it makes perfect sense that towards the end he would turn that thematic obsession into a dark comedy about the Mafia and romance. In his first film, The Maltese Falcon, Huston perfectly captured Dashiell Hammett’s acidic droll, it was a meeting of two artists with similar ideals and tastes. In Prizzi’s Honor, Huston continues that tradition of baroque humor in depicting the love triangle at the heart of the story.

Unlike The Godfather, which also told the story of one family’s tarnished reputation and eventual return to prominence in the underworld, the main thrust and tone of Prizzi’s Honor is not some elegiac tribute to the family. Instead we focus in on the adoptive son of the Prizzi crime family, Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson). Charley is the main thug and killer for the family, a man who’s brain power is, shall we say, limited at best. At a family wedding he meets a beautiful woman named Irene (Kathleen Turner), and runs into his jilted ex-lover, the Don’s granddaughter Maerose (Anjelica Huston). The beautiful woman is a killer-for-hire and a thief, and much of the movie’s tension comes from this fact. That, and Anjelica Huston’s scheming, bruised pride being harnessed into taking the two of them out as a form of ego-boosting (hers is, without a doubt, the best in the entire movie).

It all sounds far more serious than it is. The pitch-black comedy comes in thick, like the scene where Turner and Nicholson are making dinner plans while disposing of the bodies that have accumulated after their latest killing. Or the way that Huston’s character pretends to have black eyes in order to frame Nicholson for taking advantage of her. But nothing hits the subversive streak quite like the fact that Nicholson and Turner get contracted to murder each other. Before Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were sexing up the screen in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Prizzi’s Honor was giving you confused giggles over a matrimonial strife.