<P> The Family was released on Cassette Tape and Paperback on 17 December 2013 . </P> <P> Rotten Tomatoes shows that 29% of 127 reviews rated it positively; the average rating is 4.6 / 10 . The site's consensus is: "Luc Besson's The Family suffers from an overly familiar setup and a number of jarring tonal shifts ." Another review aggregator, Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 top reviews from mainstream critics, calculated a score of 42 based on 32 reviews . </P> <P> Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The A.V. Club gave the film a B −, and said: "Besson creates the impression that The Family is set in a world drawn from gangster movies and comic strips--an idea that culminates in De Niro participating, as the town's token American, in a film club discussion of a certain Martin Scorsese movie ." Stephanie Merry from The Washington Post gave the film one out of four stars, stating: "There's little to laugh about in dark comedy' The Family' ." Time Out's critic, Nick Schager, gave the film one out of five stars, sayin that film director Luc Besson "treats his protagonists as likable cartoons yet never provides a single reason to view them as anything less than remorseless, repugnant psychos ." MSN Entertainment gave the film three out of five stars, saying: "Sharper, smarter and slicker than it looks, there's a lot to like about "The Family ." </P> <P> Linda Barnard from Toronto Star gave the film two out of four stars, saying: "While Besson knows his way around an action film, he's not as adept at comedy . The result is an often - violent, occasionally amusing fish - out - of - eau tale that plunks a family of wise guys in the French countryside with predictable results ." Mack Rawden from Cinema Blend gave the film three out of five stars, saying: "It uses irregular De Niro voiceovers on occasion . It reads segments of a book on occasion . It even uses bad dreams and flashbacks, all of which, when used together, make the film seem disorganized and poorly put together . All of that, coupled with more than a few jokes that fall flat and a plot that's windy and strangely paced keep The Family from being anything more than a likeable enough way to spend an hour and forty - five minutes ." Stephen Holden of the New York Times summed up the mixed reaction to the film: "The movie has holes galore . It has abrupt tonal shifts, an incoherent back story and abandoned subplots...But buoyed by hot performances, it sustains a zapping electrical energy ." </P>

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