The boring menu of “Mafia Momma”

Continued from page 5 reference, until the joke gets tired). At the family home, she’s shown a video message designating her as the successor. She tries to flee, but Bianca tells her she can’t run from her destiny. And so the film chronicles her making peace with that destiny, even if peace means severing a few eyeballs from their sockets along the way.

Not that Kristin becomes evil or anything. Most of her bad deeds are done by accident or in self-defense. But the worst deed of all is that the movie can’t decide what it wants her, or itself, to be. It’s not fully slapstick comedy - wine-stomping scenes aside - and hardly a serious crime saga.

Most of all, it seems to want to tell a story of female empowerment; at one point Kristin is re- minded to never let a man dictate who she can be or what she can do. Nice message, but it’s muddled. Who exactly is dictating? Surely not her husband, a caricature of a doofus.

And so, despite some satisfying moments, by the increasingly cringe-worthy last third of the movie you’re just annoyed that it seems to want to cover all bases - to have its, er, cannoli and eat it, too. Maybe Kristin should just eat, pray, you-know-what, and head on home.

“Mafia Mamma,” a Bleecker Street release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America “for bloody violence, sexual content and language.” Running time: 101 minutes.