Mickey Blue Eyes

Possibly Hugh Grant's greatest atrocity yet in a career liberally littered with them, this obnoxiously crass and racist pseudo-comedy is about as amusing and enjoyable as being hit repeatedly over the head with a sledgehammer while an endless remix of Queen's 'We Will Rock You' plays incessantly in the background.

Transplanting Hugh's already over-familiar twit-brit persona into a Mob/New York scenario, Mickey Blue Eyes is a lightweight farce which relies entirely on its quota of laughs to carry it through. Its almost-total lack of comic value scuttles the entire project from the outset.

Not exactly stretching his repertoire, Hugh plays a dorkish, impeccably-mannered art auctioneer who gets engaged to sultry Italian-American siren Gina (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and thereby becomes easy prey for her imposing family, the mafioso Grazioli clan.

While I'm never too hasty to get worked up into a PC frenzy about racial stereotyping, it's beyond argument that the film's depiction of the Italian-American community is unsavoury and insulting in the extreme. James Caan isn't too bad as Hugh's prospective dad-in-law, but a withered old beast named Burt Young turns in a lamentably clownish performance as the allegedly terrifying godfather-type figure Uncle Vito, and the script aims for easy-option laughs again and again, missing the target with alarming regularity.

The relative comic highlights of the film are the scenes which require Hugh to pose extremely unconvincingly as a gangster, while his new in-laws attempt to flog their (gloriously tasteless) paintings for astonishing sums of money on the auction circuit, thus implicating our hapless hero in out-and-out criminality. Hugh, of course, keeps on hitting his one note over and over, to supremely irritating effect, while the Graziolis are neither menacing nor amusing.

Tripplehorn saves one or two scenes, with commendable assistance from the wardrobe department, but on all other levels, Mickey Blue Eyes is an unforgivable enterprise.