Mickey Blue Eyes

Put together the director of "National Lampoon's Senior Trip" and two nutsacks with laptops and you get two things. First is a fantastic reason to loosen gun-ownership laws and legalize certain types of homicide. Second is "Mickey Blue Eyes," a dreadful pile of rotting flesh that nobody in his right mind gives a flying fuck about, not even the people who made it. And yet, the whole mess just goes on and on and on.

While the story of a proper Englishman who gets mixed up in the mob sounds like a typical fish-out-of-water story, "Mickey Blue Eyes" is not. No, this one's a shit-out-of-toilet story, and it stinks. The whole freakin' movie feels like the desperate act of untalented dipshits who wanted to make money more than a movie.

Hugh Grant plays a prissy art auctioner in love with a bland school teacher (Jeanne Tripplehorn). He wants marry her, presumably so they can create their own breed of super-annoying babies, but she refuses because she loves him too much to involve him with her mafia dad. Well, Grant convinces her that love will conquer all (like Godzilla in "Monster Island"). Before he knows it, the limey is up to his elbows in mafia ties.

First, the mob uses Grant's auction house to launder money. Next, he finds himself taking the blame for killing and burying the mob boss's son, and finally he finds his life threatened by the uncreatively stereotyped gangsters. They plan to kill Grant at his wedding, but he goes to the FBI, and they capture all the mobsters. Tripplehorne and Grant, live happily ever after.

Making "Mickey Blue Eyes" had to have been the cinematic equivalent of selling miracle car dusters at the County Fair. It wasn't done for love, only to fleece morons out of their money. While the studio (or duster salesman) pretends what they are selling is a good product, they know deep down that it's crap. They don't care, though, because if they admit to themselves that it's a scam, they might not make any money. There is no way this lifeless mess would have gotten made if anyone involved with it cared about us. Someone would have stopped and said, "Wait a minute. I wouldn't pay to see this so why should I expect anybody else?"

Director Kelly Makin has made a movie that is so presistently stupid and yet somehow convoluted to the point of confusing at the end. She guides this movie as though it was a bloated corpse drifting on the Mississippi, pushing it along with a stick, never getting too involved and never fully having control. As a result, "Mickey Blue Eyes" just slowly plods downstream, bumping into shit and occasionally disappearing in the muck, until it reaches its conclusion. It never gets exciting, never raises the tension, and stays consistently boring. Makin didn't expect much from her actors so she didn't get much. To be fair, though, Makin has a unique talent: the ability to telegraph every lame punchline eight minutes ahead of its delivery.

There is a special corner of hell reserved for America's Public Enemies Number One, "writers" Robert Kuhn and Adam Scheinman. This is the third steaming load they left on the doorsteps of American moviegoers. Past efforts include the awful "Little Big League" and "The Cure." I bet these jerks are not funny guys in real life, no matter how hard they try. I think they scare children and laugh their asses off while watching "Hollywood Squares" in the big, fancy houses our admission fees have bought them. One thing is for sure, they don't write movies they think audiences will enjoy, they write formulaic ideas that they hope the fuckers at the studios will buy.

They must know how lame their jokes are. If they don't, they're bigger retards than that character Juliet Lewis played earlier this year. Most likely, they're just pricks who happily steal from old "Three's Company" episodes because they think people don't deserve any better. In "Mickey Blue Eyes," the list of crimes include lame running gags, like the old lady who wants to buy a painting from his auction house and is told to bid when Grant's character coughs. Of course, Grant accidentally coughs and non-hilarity ensues. And how soon will I please be able to forget the "wacky" characters like the oddball brother or the camera-toting bridesmaid who Kuhn and Scheinman assume we'll laugh at just because we're expected to? These hacks even use spunky old people in a desperate attempt spice up the comedy, because they think audiences love to laugh at the frailty of the nearly dead. Then there's the obvious "comedy" of Grant's English character trying to learn how to say "Fuhgeddaboutit." In the movie's most remarkably horrid stab at comedy, a plush toy gorilla is carted around one scene by Grant for absolutely no reason other than so it can say recorded "funny" things.

Thanks to Makin's lukewarm direction, every gag just lays there, stinking up the joint like a dead carp at a dinner party.

(Note to Kuhn and Scheinman: You have made yourself writers who are only involved in movies for people who do not love movies. You make the movies for people who go to the cineplex without knowing which movie they want to see.)

The characters of "Mickey Blue Eyes" are uniformly stale and one-dimensional. Tripplehorn is given nothing to work with except that her character is the purely good school-teacher that all shitty movies have because it's too much trouble for hack screenwriters to think up interesting personal lives. Grant's character is based on the sorry assumption that flustering the 

British is funny. The mafiosos are many-times-removed from showing any hint of originality. It's like someone made a Xerox copy of "The Godfather" and then kept photocopying the copies until all the detail and nuance was blurred out of existence.

One fucking finger for Kuhn, Scheinman and "Mickey Blues Eyes." It's a horrible, hateful exercise in greed by Hollywood vultures. This bullshit should have gone straight to video and been given away for free so we could all have a copy and tape over it.

I can get in trouble for asking people to kill these writers, but not if I just ask everyone to pray for them to die slow, painful deaths. So, let's all put our hands together before they write again.