There is an oddly unfinished quality about this Mafia comedy, as if director Susan Seidelman had lost interest or control or had got distracted by something else. (Possibly something, in specific, starring Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr. Something called She-Devil.) Whatever the case, there are scenes here that never get off the ground or never get to a point, and are gotten out of with desperately cutesified transitional tricks. The tempo is unsteady and without bounce. Even the color still seems to await a fine-tune. (Shocking to say about so perky a colorist as Seidelman.) And the overall concept loses luster by running so close on the heels of other underworld comedies that had already blazed the trail of Mafiosi poor taste in interior decoration, etc. In that and related areas, Cookie shows a better eye than Married to the Mob and better production values than Spike of Bensonhurst. It is less eccentric than Spike, but less pretentious than Mob. Colder-blooded than Mob, warmer-blooded than Spike. But enough of comparison. Seidelman has always tended to put people off with her relative coolness, at least those who make the mistake of accounting warmth an intrinsic merit in movies: the mistake, that is, of confusing their home thermostat with the climate of a separate fictional world. While it's true that she never descends to flattery of her characters -- even and especially her centermost characters -- she gains by that a genuine tolerance and liberality, a patience in particular with highly trying rebel types (Desperately Seeking Susan, Smithereens). She, lacking even more in daintiness than she does in warmth, can embrace what she does not necessarily endorse. And her suspected misanthropy is at every point rebutted by her care in casting. Jerry Lewis, Lionel Stander, Brenda Vacarro, Ricki Lake, just in bit-parts. And in the larger parts, Emily Lloyd (British star of Wish You Were Here, in her American debut), Peter Falk, and, upstaging everyone, Dianne Wiest. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd
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