Luc Besson’s career has always provided a mixed bag of delights, but even when projects don’t come off as perfectly as Leon (surely his masterpiece), the failures are at least interesting. Nobody could call The Fifth Element a classic, but it is still wildly inventive and very entertaining.

In tackling the story of a mafia family struggling to live under witness protection in France, and casting Robert De Niro – a man more than familiar with the gangster genre – as the head of the family, you might hope that he’d be able to offer a sort of career retrospective. Think Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, but for gangsters. Despite all the pieces being in place to offer exactly this, The Family fails almost entirely.

Robert De Niro is mostly watchable as the former Mafioso turned rat, but Michelle Pfeiffer’s gangster’s wife is a terrible character – in all senses of the word. That’s the main problem with The Family and the family – they’re both populated with horrible, horrible people.

The joke is that they solve everyday problems in the way that they might once have solved a gang war back in their old lives, only it’s a joke that’s played to such extremes that it never manages to be funny. The family run around fixing all their problems by punching people and being as obnoxious as possible to everyone they meet. Blowing up a super-market because the staff were a bit snippy is not only not funny, it’s unbelievable and downright distasteful. The family are psychopaths – and these are the people we’re supposed to sympathise with?

In fairness, John D’Leo as the son is nowhere near as hateable as the rest. D’Leo uses his mafia-world skills to navigate the social pitfalls of joining a new school in a far more entertaining and plausible way, and D’Leo is the only performer who seems to have gauged the appropriate tone of the piece. Had the film been centred on him, things might have been different – Rian Johnson’s Brick through a gangster filter, rather than a noir one.

Sadly, even the school sections are bogged down by Glee’s Dianna Agron, whose performance as the daughter is as misjudged as her character’s attempts at finding love (she, again, is mostly only interested in being a terrible human being throughout).

The Family suffers from not knowing what sort of film it wants to be. It’s all over the place tonally, and certain elements are introduced and dropped again at the drop of a hat. The French setting adds nothing, and the action, which could have been a saving grace, feels disjointed and out-of-place.

The comedy is near non-existent; a running joke about De Niro using one particular, monosyllabic profanity to convey a variety of meanings is explained amusingly by the son, but falls flat in the father’s delivery (symptomatic of the film at large), only succeeding towards the end when the punch-line is delivered by someone else.

As the seasoned old pros, De Niro and Tommy Lee Jones (as the family’s weary handler) have some good chemistry, but when it’s in the service of such weak material it feels like a waste. Later on there are hints of the film that could have been, as De Niro, being an authentic New-Yorker, is invited along to a screening of Goodfellas to comment on its authenticity. As he goes glassy-eyed and reminisces about the loves and losses, trials and hardships of the life he left behind, the pathos starts to flow and you wonder why the whole film wasn’t more focussed on this aspect of the story.

As it is, The Family is a missed opportunity, and not even a valiant failure.

Released in UK cinemas on Friday 22 November 2013.