The original title, Jane Austen's Mafia!, was shortened for the publicity campaign, although the whole of it still appears on screen in the final print. We may presume that this joke did not "score" particularly well with the test-screening audiences or market-survey groups (giving them false expectations, perhaps, of a wicked exposé of the Janeite cult), and that by then it was either too late or too costly to retract the offending words. Filmmaker Jim Abrahams could certainly have afforded to drop a single joke without doing damage to the overall average of jokes per minute. Even the pickiest spectator ought to be able to find a few to laugh at, despite the frequency with which the eagerness to please crosses the line between ingratiating and embarrassing. The principal targets of parody are, predictably, Casino, The Godfather, and The Godfather, Part II, though the aim will unpredictably widen to such innocent and distant bystanders as The English Patient, Forrest Gump, and Jurassic Park: The Lost World. The not terribly attractive cast -- Jay Mohr, Christina Applegate, Pamela Gidley, the near-death Lloyd Bridges, an unrecognizable Olympia Dukakis, and a handful of stock Italian-American goons -- has been assembled with a similar carelessness. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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