Mickey Blue Eyes (1999) Reviewed by Eugene Novikov http://www.ultimate-movie.com Member: Online Film Critics Society
*** out of four
"Here's a painting by one of our newest artists. It's entitled 'Die Piggy Piggy Die Die"
Starring Hugh Grant, James Caan, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Burt Young. Rated PG-13.
Hollywood actors with strong British accents and no desire to master an American one will have trouble getting roles that don't involve playing an Englishman in America. This has led to the constant typecasting of talents like Hugh Grant who always ends up playing the bumbling Brit in romantic comedies when he is likely capable of so much more. Thus his performances have become excruciatingly predictable. As many have pointed out, Hugh Grant is a great personality and an even better screen presence. A shame his personality and presence are precisely the same in nearly every film he does.
Mickey Blue Eyes is a romantic comedy but it is also a spoof of organized crime. It is not the outright parody that Mafia! was and it takes its story very seriously but the script certainly has a satirical edge. Grant plays Michael Felgate, a New York auctioneer who is madly in love with Gina Vitale (Jeanne Tripplehorn). He finds an elaborate way of proposing marriage to her. It backfires, but when he does get around to asking her to marry him she breaks into tears and runs away.
Why? Mike finds out that she is part of a mafioso family. Most of her relatives have spent time in jail at some point in their lives and are still very much mobsters. Gina insists that shoe can't marry him because it will get him involved in her family's dealings. They do you one favor, she says, and you're indebted to them forever.
Eventually Gina gives in and the couple weds, but only after Michael solemnly swears that he will not get involved with her family. He does, of course. The mob scratches his back and he is forced to scratch back. They (Gina's father, played by James Caan, her uncle the mob boss portrayed by Burt Young and others played by Joe Viterelli and John Ventimiglia) get Michael involved in a money laundering scheme by making Michael auction off various paintings of theirs, making people that owe them money buy those paintings and making Michael hand over the money. This gets Michael in some trouble with the FBI who are wise to the mobsters' schemes.
Scripted by Adam Scheinman (Little Big League) and Robert Kuhn (The Cure, an underrated 1995 gem) and directed by Kids in the Hall veteran Kelly Makin, Mickey Blue Eyes is a tremendously funny movie. The jabs at the mafia are not as in-your-face as they were in Mafia! but they are twice as witty and twice as entertaining. A few, indeed, garnered none other than belly laughs from me, which took me by surprise because what I had expected least from this movie is the do-anything-for-a-laugh attitude it employed.
The highlight of this energetic romp has to be the brilliant, knee- slapping turn by the often humorless James Caan (Eraser). Everything he tries with his deadpan performance works and the result is comedy bliss. Hugh Grant is equally effective; he manages to be funny even though he is playing the same role he's played in countless movies. The only weak link in the cast is Jeanne Tripplehorn who manages to make her character bitchy for 99% of her screen time. Why would Hugh Grant want to marry her again?
It's a shame that the romance disappears for most of the middle portion of the film to make room for Michael's mafia antics. Funny as those may be, if this is the romantic comedy that Warner is oh-so-feverishly trying to promote, why not make the romance a central part of the picture? That worked so well in Notting Hill.
The ending of the movie is far too convenient and too cloying, but everything leadiing up to it is a comic delight. Affectionate, hilarious and light as a feather, Mickey Blue Eyes may not be the movie of the year but it's an entertaining -- if instantly forgettable -- diversion. ©1999 Eugene Novikov‰
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