As the film opens, Tony introduces the main thread when he exits a Vegas casino and walks to his car, accompanied by a voiceover explaining his philosophy of life.

The story then regresses more than half a century to describe the boyhood of Tony's father, Vincenzo, who was born in Italy, the clumsy son of a Sicilian postman.

The boy escapes to America, where he grows to young manhood, marries, and struggles with poverty before finally finding his destiny as a mafia boss.

Tony avenges the attack, then goes into hiding in Las Vegas, where Cesar Marzoni offers him the opportunity to manage his casino, The Peppermill.

Tony accepts and his casino is a great success until he meets a femme fatale, Pepper Gianini, hired by Marzoni as part of a deep-laid plan to distract him from his duties and to drive a wedge between him and Joey.

The Don then returns home, where he falls victim to his 5-year-old grandson, Chucky, who assassinates him by spraying him with malathion (parody of Vito Corleone's heart attack in The Godfather).

The film returns to the present after Tony catches Joey and Pepper cavorting in a hotel room together and walks out in disgust - only to have his car explode.

Tony is horribly but temporarily disfigured, and attends his father's funeral in a wheelchair, where he spots the killers when he sees little Chucky taking a payoff from a rival Don.

During the ceremony, with the help of Vincenzo's Mom Sophia (Dukakis), and Tony's right-hand man Nick "The Eskimo" Molinaro, and a generic henchman, He settles the family's accounts in an orgy of slaughter (filmed similarly to the end of The Godfather), even arranging the harpooning of Barney the Dinosaur as a bonus.

"[10] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who gave the film two out of four stars, wrote: Yes, I laughed during Jim Abrahams' Mafia!, but even in mid-chortle I was reminded of the gut-busting experience last week of seeing There's Something About Mary.

The underworld gags are limited and repetitive, without the ripely promiscuous media-age lunacy that, in a comedy like The Naked Gun, made you feel as if the film were tickling funny bones you never even knew existed.

Jay Mohr, as the Michael Corleone surrogate, and Billy Burke, as his psycho-hothead brother, don't even look the part—they're like preppies clowning in a Harvard spoof—and so the film gets virtually no lift from its performers.