What's the story about? Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner both are hitmen. They fall in love within 1 hour and get married after a day. As a newly married couple together they get a hitmen assignment in which they have to kidnap a banker and demand for ransom. Things go awry and what happens next cant be explained without revealing spoilers. But it is a great story, however unbelievable it may be at times.Everybody loves Jack. Jack is the Man. Whatever movie he plays in, his charisma will carry the picture. He acts brilliantly. Everybody does in this picture by the way. But there is something fishy about this picture, because it is an odd gangster story. It is at moments a very unbelievable gangster story. Director John Huston made something which is called a pastiche. That means this story is a comical story but with the twist that you often dont know if it is meant to be funny. The Coen Brothers are very good at walking this fine line between serious acting and humor. But a pastiche is a very delicate tightrope, because when a director doesnt get it exactly right the humor fails. Prizzi's Honor could have been better if director John Huston had made a choice between wanting to make a comedy or a serious drama. Now it is really neither. He failed at making a pastiche. And made me feel uncomfortable in watching certain moments in the story, because often I didnt know if something was meant to be funny or not But I definitely knew it couldnt be taken seriously either. Uncomfortable split. Not funny, cant be taken seriously either. I guess that those who love straight comedies wont like this gangster picture very much, because of this failure at making a good pastiche.Still I personally do love this picture very much, because the acting and the incredible story are still very enticing. Jack Nicholson carries this movie with his usual charisma. I love this man. The supporting actors are really wonderful too. Acting is always paramount. Give me any movie with good acting in it and I will be able to enjoy it, as long as the characters are true to life. Prizzi's Honor passes with flying colors as far as acting and credibility is concerned. Too bad the pastiche kind of humor didnt always work out great.

Stiff direction and a poor performance by Jack Nicholson strangle John Huston's "Prizzi's Honor", a black comedy about a slow witted Mafia man who falls in love with a glamorous Californian woman (Kathleen Turner).Huston spends much of the film mocking notions of "honour" and "obligation". Elsewhere he has Turner's sentimentality and conformism (she expects men to capture babies, to want sex rather than assassinate her etc) result in her downfall. Turner may play a headstrong, undercover assassin, but certain quaint expectations she has of men leads to her ruin. Men, apparently, are dishonourable, unreliable oafs, a fact which gets Turner a knife in the head.5/10 – Dull.

Deliciously tongue in cheek, "Prizzi's Honor" is a black comedy where the lives of two "hit men" are intertwined in an all-out mob war. It all starts off with a delicious spoof of a mob wedding (the type seen in "The Godfather") with close-ups of all the eccentric characters you will meet in the next two hours. They include guests Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner as the two hired assassins who meet, share a dance, after which they fall in love, marry and share a hit. Nicholson and Turner share much tenderness in their love scenes, so this is as far as Turner's later "War of the Roses" as you can get. Add on some truly funny "Dick Tracy" like characterizations by Anjelica Huston and William Hickey, and the result is a spoof of a Greek tragedy, New York Sicilian style! The magnificent Huston shines as a black sheep mob princess turned spider woman. The future movie Morticia Addams (and a delightful sorceress in "The Witches") begins her career of larger than life characterizations. While she had been around seemingly for ages, this is the film that brought her into the consciousness of the film-going public. Her director father John Huston wisely chose her for a part that in the 1940's, Gale Sondergaard would have slithered in front of a camera for. Hickey, in the role of the Prizzi patriarch, seems so aware of his grotesque appearance that he utilizes it to his advantage to deliver the type of performance that makes him unforgettable.Nicholson and Turner are outstanding but unfortunately, Turner is nowhere as near to her future flamboyant characters, sort of a calmer "Serial Mom" who does mob hits rather than kill teachers for flunking her son in math. Nicholson, either adding cotton or ecologin to his upper lips, is nowhere close to any of his many grotesque characterizations, and this brings out a truly original performance. One of the best screenplays of the 1980's, superb direction by a master, makes this a classic of the genre of mob films resulting in an instant masterpiece.

In the 1970s the honourable mafia family was the stuff of sophisticated drama, so it only follows that in the 1980s it would be fair game for a spoof. Prizzi's Honor actually features a fairly serious and workable plot, a Machiavellian tale of revenge and double-cross, and looks like it may have begun life at one point as a straight crime pictures. However rather than rehashing a bunch of clichés it takes the tack of sending up that world of casual violence, unshakeable loyalty and half-mumbled Italian accents.Yes, the basic approach here is to reel out the sillier aspects of the mafia movie and make them sillier still. Jack Nicholson reprises his post-lobotomy face from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and throws in a few Brando-esque grunts and bits of business. It's not among his best comedic roles. William Hickey is actually quite subtle and nuanced as the stereotypical elderly Don, but the performance is just too much of a caricature for anything outside complete farce, which this isn't. Prizzi's Honor does however contain some very fine non-comedy performances. Anjelica Huston stands out in her smooth and confident portrayal of the manipulative outcast daughter. She really dominates the screen without ever once exaggerating or using some trite gesture. Kathleen Turner is very good too. Watch her eyes in the scene where she and Nicholson have their first drink together – she's not listening to him, she's eyeing him up.Director John Huston was a veteran of the classic era, now in the twilight of his career. In Prizzi's Honor he displays the professionalism of his generation and the uncomplicated, unostentatious approach of an older man, as well as the various tricks that he had been using to make great pictures since the 1940s. He knows exactly how little input is really needed from the camera, letting the action play out in some very long takes, shifting our focus by smoothly dollying in. Sometimes, rather than changing angle or moving in he will have the actor do the work. For example, there is a scene with John Randolph on the phone, sitting back in his chair, but at a key moment in the dialogue he leans forward, effectively putting himself into close-up without the camera moving an inch. His detachment from the action can be sublimely elegant, such as the garage door slowly coming down for a killing to take place offscreen. Huston was never known as much of a comedy director, and as I've hinted the cod-Sicilian business isn't that funny, but he works in a handful of nice sight gags such as a trio of rudeboys all handcuffed together in a row.The trouble is, Prizzi's Honor is a dreadful mediocrity, and it's not just the hit-and-miss comedy that is to blame. True, the plot is strong enough to have been done without the spoofing, but to be fair the mobster archetypes are so familiar it would be hard to do it any other way without seeming corny. The real problem is that it simply doesn't have enough meat to its bones. There are some decent characters, and their machinations certainly make for a good story, but there just aren't the great, memorable set-pieces or crackling dialogue to make the whole thing rattle along as any decent crime drama should, comical or otherwise. It's a shame. With the amount of talent available here this is a wasted opportunity.