MICKEY BLUE EYES
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: A callow young auctioneer finds out
that the father of the woman he wants to marry is a
mobster and he is marrying into a crime family.
Hugh Grant is developing into a very uninteresting
actor incapable of putting any depth into his
characters. This film starts with a rudimentary
plot and then just fills time until it has enough
to make this a feature film length. Rating: 4 (0
to 10), 0 (-4 to +4)
Michael Felgate (played by Hugh Grant) is Manhattan art auctioneer with a mild, non-assertive personality. He lets the truckers he deals with walk all over him. He wants to marry Gina (Jean Tripplehorn) and she seems to love him, but she is strangely reticent to marry for reasons she will not say. When Michael goes to her father's bar and restaurant he finds out part of the reason why. Her father (James Caan) and her uncles make up a dangerous crime family. Gina is sure that if Michael marries into the family he will be pulled into the criminal activity. Mike is just as certain that there is no reason that he would do that. But almost immediately he is asked as a favor to use his auction house to auction off a garish painting created by one of the crime family members. This starts an escalating chain of reluctant favors and counter-favors and a chain of events that pull Mike into the whirlpool associating him closer and closer to organized crime.
The problem with this film is that it seems to have been written by formula. It started with a skeleton of a cliched plot and then apparently the writers started hanging jokes on it like ornaments on a Christmas tree. The jokes all have little to do with each other. The most that they have in common is that they use of screen time. One can almost see the writers sitting there saying, "Okay, now we have a 45- minute story. Let's throw in a comic FBI agent. Now we are up to 50 minutes...." Even then the central plot builds to a very predictable ending. Anyone surprised by the surprise ending is probably new to 1990s cinema.
Hugh Grant was charming early in his career with his boyish smile and youthful charm. But he seems incapable of stretching himself as an actor or leaving his comfort zone. In this film we care for his character about to the extent that we want to cuddle and protect a small child. Listening to him try to talk like a gangster is like watching a child trying to sound like an adult in a school play. It is cute but it is not really entertaining and shows very little accomplishment. Here we are not pulled into the plot or the irony of the situation and the jokes are not particularly perceptive. And worst of all they are rarely funny. The views we have of crime figures are largely cliched. That is part of the joke, that they are instantly recognizable as crime figures. That worked in THE FRESHMAN, but that film had a much better story behind it. James Caan provides the only interesting role interpretation and even he can not make things click.
This comedy overall seems tired with far too few jokes that hit home. It is for fans of Hugh Grant and nobody else. I give it a 4 on the 0 to 10 scale and a +0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1999 Mark R. Leeper
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