Untamed Heart

Tony Bill directs a fresh and only occasionally too purple script by Tom Sierchio. [12 Feb 1993, p.C]

The movie is kind of sweet and kind of goofy, and works because its heart is in the right place. Read full review

Tearjerking aside, Untamed Heart reminds us of the bravery it takes to love. That's the ultimate source of its appeal. [12 Feb 1993, p.50]

As soft and tentative as her dramatic surroundings may be, Tomei remains an amazingly clear and vivid presence; she has the star's ability to establish her own reality at the center of something hopelessly false. She'll be remembered; Untamed Heart almost certainly won't be. [12 Feb 1993, p.B]

If anything saves Untamed Heart from itself, it's Tomei's performance which, if nothing else, proves that her terrific turn in My Cousin Vinny was no fluke. She's a star on the rise, and even in a formula flick that is something to see. [12 Feb 1993, p.20]

If you went by the coming attractions and the advertisements, you might expect a predictable romance pitched on the level of a TV sitcom. But Untamed Heart is a movie of rare sweetness. [12 Feb 1993, p.D1]

First-time writer Tom Sierchio occasionally lapses into Love Story-style sentiment, and surprisingly Bill is willing to go along, but Untamed Heart (wisely retitled from its original Baboon Heart) is strong enough to hold up against its cornier inclinations. [12 Feb 1993, p.23]

This is a deceptively low-key movie with emotions visibly raw. Tomei (and Slater, too) give it the heart it sorely needs. [12 Feb 1993, p.8D]

It is Tomei's movie. The actress brings an energy and sincerity to her roles that takes them beyond whatever they were written to be and makes them almost unreasonably appealing. For all the improbabilities in Untamed Heart, the most improbable is that Caroline has a history of men running away from her. [15 Feb 1993, p.C06]

By all rights, a movie about a girl who finds true love with an orphaned busboy (Christian Slater) who needs a heart transplant should be a hoot. It’s a unique premise--that doesn’t mean it’s a good premise. And swatches of the film are indeed as goopy as one might fear. But what keeps the film together is Tomei’s performance. Read full review

Slater's greasy-haired 'Beast' is not for the hard-boiled, but see the film for Tomei's sensitive, doe-eyed 'Beauty', and for Bill's sure feel for an authentic downtown milieu. Read full review

Appealing lead performances elevate this modestly scaled romantic tearjerker, from a first script by Tom Sierchio. Read full review

Untamed Heart is a gentle fable, a contemporary re-working of myths that will always cut close to the bone - myths about love and magic, about the silence that speaks volumes and the peace that surpasses understanding. It's certainly not a perfect film, but there's a sweet integrity to the writing and a stern refusal to compromise itself, to bow to the dictates of formula. [12 Feb 1993]

If Untamed Heart is often too precious for words, there’s one thing in it that feels miraculously fresh: the performance of Marisa Tomei, who follows up her rollicking caricature of a streetwise Italian dish in My Cousin Vinny by proving that she’s a major actress. Read full review

The romantic fable Untamed Heart is hopelessly syrupy, preposterous and more than a little bit lame, but, still, somehow it got to me. Read full review

The Rain Man-Dying Young elements in Tom Sierchio’s script are pitfalls that Slater dodges with a wonderfully appealing performance. His love scenes with the dazzling Tomei have an uncommon delicacy. But it’s Tomei and Perez who give Untamed Heart its bouyant wit. Their friendship could have sustained an entire movie. It’s certainly the best part of this one. Read full review

Untamed Heart veers into the contrived and the schmaltzy too often to really work the way it wants to. But Tomei and Slater rise above the material. It's their characters, and their unique, touching relationship, that you'll remember. [15 Feb 1993, p.C3]

If the script lays the broken heart metaphor a tad too thick and the ending has a fatal inevitability that you can spot a mile off, Bill, to his credit, plays it all straight from the heart (pun intended). Go armed with a very large box of Kleenex. Read full review

It's fun to watch the gifted Marisa Tomei and the lively Rosie Perez, but Christian Slater is less engaging as the waif of the story, and the screenplay is loaded with sentimentality. [26 Feb 1993, p.14]

It's a sure sign of how good Tomei is that she can even occasionally do something with Tom Sierchio's lachrymose script; the usually wonderful Rosie Perez, stuck with an uninteresting part, is less lucky. Read full review

An offbeat romance as dysfunctional as its lovers. [17 Feb 1993, p.5B]

The film benefits from an appealing cast, though neither Slater, Tomei, nor Perez is called on to stretch very far. Though actor-turned-director Tony Bill has proved himself adept at character-driven dramas like MY BODYGUARD, the material he's working with here is simply not up to scratch. Read full review

Unless you're a fan of Slater or Tomei, or hopelessly addicted to sappy, ineptly-handled love stories, there's no reason whatsoever to subject yourself to this movie. Read full review

There's no getting around this dumb script that's just too silly for words. Read full review

Untamed Heart is to the mind what freshly discarded chewing gum is to the sole of a shoe: an irritant that slows movement without any real danger of stopping it. Read full review

Slater is monosyllabic and mostly expressionless. When Tomei and Perez speak, they have nothing to say, as contrasted with the rapid-fire lines they had in their earlier films, lines that kept them interested and enthusiastic, so that their performances just glowed. Here, they're as dull as the dishwater in the diner, and so is the entire movie, tragic ending and all. [12 Feb 1993, p.3F]