Joe Pesci in Goodfellas... now there's a fuckin' funny guy. An ice pick in the cranium or maybe even a couple of bodies stashed in a car trunk might have done similar wonders for the agonizing tempo of The Mobster's Wife, a film that manages lavish attempts at minimal laughs.

The usual list of mob nicknames and the ever-popular tough-guy-movie salutation "Piece of shit" being its idea of banter, Mobster's Wife, as comedy, has sufficient grounds for divorce. Which is what the philandering Vince Vouyer is headed for if he's not careful. Vouyer's wife, Alexandra Silk (her exaggerated East Coastisms suggest Silk's been brushing up on her Joan Cusack), nearly catches Vince putting it to his bimbo, Lexus, whose gum-snapping suggests her attendance at the same Cusack film festival.

Like any inspired two-timer, stogie-chomping Vince packs his old lady off to "Maly-boo," not counting on a brush with the rival Montoya family in Vegas when he mistakenly fucks the patriarch's daughter (Stephanie Swift) in the men's room right before her wedding. (Trust us, it's funnier on paper.)

As one might suspect, Vince's goon, Tony Tedeschi, who's forever trying to fix someone a "with," comes up wtih just the right bologna to stuff Silk's asshole in their hot-tub tryst. If one is to discount a disturbing ignorance of condom etiquette witnessed in two anal threeways (Silk gets it in the butt with the same rubber that Marcus has just used on Lexus; similarly, Katie Gold after Vouyer's just rammed Shay Sweet), the Tedeschi-Silk pairing is, arguably, the film's heat leader. At least it's one of the few scenes that remain unimpeded by either perspersistentaways or a vague sense of timing that elects for tease sequences totally out of context.

A couple of cute moments are managed in the two-hour-plus running time. Then, again, even a spastic with a 12-gauge nails a duck on occasion.