Oh, those wacky mobsters! Tony Santini (Danny Aiello), longtime number-one guy in Hoboken's Italian mob, swore to his late brother that he'd always look after his nephew, Anthony (Robert Capelli Jr., who also co-directed and co-wrote). But Anthony is an idiot: He and his equally stupid friend Tommy (Artie Lange) can't even pick up a simple payoff without screwing things up. And now Uncle Tony has a new headache in the form of some guy named Pavel (Steven Ogg), the number two Russian mob guy in New York's Little Odessa, calling up about some mail order bride who's been causing them problems. This "Nina," as she calls herself, has married four Russian mobsters and then high-tailed it back to Russia with their cash. The reason it's Uncle Tony's problem is that Nina also married a Santini foot soldier named Jackie the Viking (Jackie Martling) and took off with his cash, and Jackie's making such a fuss that something has to be done. So the two bosses come to an agreement: They'll send Anthony and Ivan (Slava Schoot), the loco son of Russia's number one mobster, to Moscow to find the girl and retrieve the money. Pavel and Uncle Tony being like-minded thugs, they figure that at best they'll get the cash back, and at worst, two thorns in their sides will be temporarily removed. Once in Russia, Ivan drinks, hangs around strip clubs and annoys the hell out of his father, who sent him to New York for a reason. Unsupervised, the naive Anthony falls head over heels in love with a mercenary Russian beauty who calls herself Butterfly (Ivana Milicevic), and the only person who's surprised when she proves to be the elusive Nina everyone's looking for is Anthony himself. But wait — maybe she isn't a heartless gold-digger with her eyes on Anthony's big fat Italian wallet; the problem is proving it before Ivan and his cronies find out about her. Directed by Capelli and longtime feature-film editor Jeffrey Wolf, and co-written by Capelli and tyros Doug Bollinger and Sergey Konenkov (who also produced), this amateurish comedy features some amazing sequences shot in Moscow. But everything else about it is second rate, from the Catskills-era mob gags to second-string funny fat guy Lange's lazy buffoonery and veteran comic Frank Gorshin's mortifying mugging as a drunken Russian doctor required to remove a bullet from Anthony's derriere. --Maitland McDonagh
