‘Mob Town’ Is An Unconventional, Albeit Unpolished, Mafia Movie

[rating=6.00]

As part of the pantheon of quintessential American cinema, the mob movie is not only constantly revisited, but reinvented. Such is the case with Mob Town, a reframing of crime drama conventions, but still seems littered with the genre’s most reliable tropes.

Director Danny A. Abeckaser, working from a script by Jon Carlo and Joe Gilford, restricts the scale of its narrative to a few days in the town of Apalachin, NY in 1957. As the mafia plans a meeting with several of its figureheads from up and down the eastern seaboard in Apalachin, local police sergeant Ed Croswell (David Arquette) notices something’s afoot, and has to work vigorously to get anyone above his rank to take him seriously.

The setup for the meeting is kept to a minimum, but it involves Vito Genovese (Robert Davi) returning to America to regain control of the crime family that bears his name. As Croswell works to gather enough evidence for a case, knockaround guy Joe Barbara (Danny A. Abeckaser) frets constantly after being tasked with setting up the meeting. While it’s constantly eluded that Barbara is a feared figurehead of organized crime, the fact he spends most of the film worrying about becoming the only guy who’ll get killed for not having enough fish at a party.

However, by narrowing its focus to just a few days in upstate New York, and largely from Croswell’s perspective, it creates a unique opportunity that the film doesn’t always take advantage of. While the whole ‘small town cop cracks big, federal-level case’ trope has been tread on over and over, Mob Town spends a significant amount of time with Croswell learning how to love again after his divorce. The scenes are perfectly pleasant at the time, after the fact it’s hard not to wonder if that time could’ve been spent filling in other parts of the story.

That ends up the case with both of the main characters’ storylines, as they each try an interesting mix of podunk procedural and mob movie conventions with a kind of muddled humor that doesn’t quite seem to land. Particularly scenes with Abeckaser and his wife, played by Jamie-Lynn Sigler. Yes, little Meadow Soprano is all grown up, and has graduated to playing, a mob wife in the mid-50s.

Additionally, there are a few smatterings of Davi scenes in all his ‘every B-movie from the 90s’ glory, but often feel too sporadic and disjointed from the main story. And, after being set up as the proponent for the film, it seems to undercut his inevitable grand entrance to the meeting itself. Genovese is meant to be an imposing character, or at least referred to as such, however when he struts into the big sit-down, it lacks the punch of a definitive moment.

Still, despite some missteps, Mob Town was a pleasant, breezy mob flick that doesn’t quite upend the genre, but does try a new spin on it. Which is at least something.

Mob Town is currently playing in theaters, on VOD and Digital HD.

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