Variety
"...[A] very funny fish-out-of-water story..." 8/16-22/1999 p.28Entertainment Weekly
"...[Grant] is aptly hapless and charming..." 12/10/1999 p.118 New York Times
"...MICKEY BLUE EYES accelerates into a frenzied farce..." 08/20/1999 p.E10 USA Today
"...The beauty here is in the setup, which offers Hugh Grant a role to match his star-making turn in Britain's FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL..." 08/20/1999 p.8E Apollo Guide 8 of 10
Mild-mannered Michael Felgate (Hugh Grant) has a problem. The upstanding citizen and art auctioneer has just proposed to the woman he loves, Gina Vitale (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and now he has to deal with the reason she's saying 'no'. Gina's dad, who Michael has never met, is a mobster... If this all sounds familiar, it should. In the parlance of 1999 movies, Mickey Blue Eyes is a cross between Analyze This and Runaway Bride. Like Analyze This, most of the humour is at the expense of mobsters. Grant plays a fish out of water amidst the gangsters, much as Billy Crystal does in Analyze This. Like Runaway Bride, we've got comedy with romantic overtones... Everything here is played for laughs and some of them are big laughs. Although you can see most of the jokes coming minutes before they're actually delivered, the performances are so good that we enjoy the predictable humour anyway. Caan is wonderful as the well-intentioned but bumbling Mafia dad, looking appropriately perturbed at each unfortunate twist. Grant is his usual stuttering, uncomfortable British self... The rest of the mob crowd is also good, including a very enjoyable turn by Burt Young as the underworld boss Vito Graziosi... The laughs are hearty, even if you go into this film with a chip on your shoulder, as I did, daring it--inviting it--to fail. Mickey Blue Eyes might not be an all-time great comedy, but it's sure a lot of fun. - Brian Webster
Apollo Leisure Guide 8 of 10
Mild-mannered Michael Felgate (Hugh Grant) has a problem. The upstanding citizen and art auctioneer has just proposed to the woman he loves, Gina Vitale (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and now he has to deal with the reason she's saying 'no'. Gina's dad, who Michael has never met, is a mobster... If this all sounds familiar, it should. In the parlance of 1999 movies, Mickey Blue Eyes is a cross between Analyze This and Runaway Bride. Like Analyze This, most of the humour is at the expense of mobsters. Grant plays a fish out of water amidst the gangsters, much as Billy Crystal does in Analyze This. Like Runaway Bride, we've got comedy with romantic overtones... Everything here is played for laughs and some of them are big laughs. Although you can see most of the jokes coming minutes before they're actually delivered, the performances are so good that we enjoy the predictable humour anyway. Caan is wonderful as the well-intentioned but bumbling Mafia dad, looking appropriately perturbed at each unfortunate twist. Grant is his usual stuttering, uncomfortable British self... The rest of the mob crowd is also good, including a very enjoyable turn by Burt Young as the underworld boss Vito Graziosi... The laughs are hearty, even if you go into this film with a chip on your shoulder, as I did, daring it -- inviting it -- to fail. Mickey Blue Eyes might not be an all-time great comedy, but it's sure a lot of fun. - Brian Webster
Time Magazine 7 of 10
If there were still a British Empire, one could imagine Hugh Grant bestriding one of its far-flung ramparts, trying to bring order to unruliness. Mostly that would be a matter of self-deprecating humor, romantic chivalry, honorable business dealings, and, of course, irresistibly floppy hair. Colonialism being at something of a discount nowadays, Grant is obliged to ply his undeniable charms in cross-cultural comedies like Mickey Blue Eyes. In it, he plays a Manhattan art auctioneer named Michael Felgate, in love with a schoolteacher (Jeanne Tripplehorn) who reciprocates his affections but refuses his engagement ring... She has her reasons. They have names like Vito, Vinnie, Angelo and Ritchie, to say nothing of her father, Frank (James Caan), who runs a family restaurant in Little Italy. That's "family" in the full post-Puzo sense of the word. But Vito (Burt Young), who is the godfather here, sees opportunity in this alliance--a chance to off-load some of his talentless son's paintings and do a little money laundering via Michael's auctions... Director Kelly Makin has a gift for casually tossed-off farce. And along with Michael's bemused unflappability, his weird British conviction that somehow he will muddle through to a happy ending, that good-natured spirit carries one over some of the logical lacunae of the script... But not quite past the presence of Caan. It was only 27 years ago that his crazy volatility ignited The Godfather. Now he's almost beamish as a wary fixer. He's still funny, but his new characterization, like the success of The Sopranos and Analyze This, reminds us how quickly we have converted palpable menace to pure ethnic comedy. Is this progress? Not really. But in the context of Mickey Blue Eyes it's easy to fuhgeddaboutit. - Richard Schickel
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