Cinema: Dad is a Killer

Kevin James, Hollywood's specialist in crude comedies, plays a good family man who falls into the clutches of the mafia in "Guns Up." A vicious satire of the American dream.

The father as a heroic figure? This should really be a given in proper parenting, even if the father is Kevin James (and the mother Christina Ricci). Their son and daughter bring the problem up to date by placing it in the world of John Wick . Their brief dialogue—to be John Wick or to be married to John Wick, that is the question—captures the dynamics of this film. Like the Wick saga, it takes place in its own unreal world, one that has little to do with ours: the world of gangsters, their business dealings, and their intrigues. This world, writes Roland Barthes in his "Myths of Everyday Life," "always constructed as a cold-blooded mockery of melodrama, is also, as we know, the ultimate universe of the fairy tale."