Reception
Critical reaction to the film was fairly negative. Many critics panned the film's incoherent narrative, muddy visual style, and the casting of Lambert in the lead as Giuliano. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave The Sicilian "two thumbs down". Ebert complained about the cinematography: "The film alternates between scenes that are backlit where you can't see the faces and other scenes that were so murky that you couldn't see who was talking." Siskel attacked the film's star, "Let me just go after Christopher Lambert... because here is the center of the film. This would be as if the Al Pacino character in The Godfather were played by a member of the walking dead." In his Chicago Sun-Times review, Ebert claimed The Sicilian continues director Michael Cimino's "record of making an incomprehensible mess out of every other film he directs", contrasting the "power and efficiency" of The Deer Hunter and The Year of the Dragon with the "half-visible meditations on backlighting" of Heaven's Gate and The Sicilian.
Vincent Canby of The New York Times said, "Cimino's fondness for amber lighting and great, sweeping camera movements are evident from time to time, but the film is mostly a garbled synopsis of the Puzo novel." Variety added "Cimino seems to be aiming for an operatic telling of the short career of the violent 20th-century folk hero [based on Mario Puzo's novel], but falls into an uncomfortable middle ground between European artfulness and stock Hollywood conventions." Hal Hinson of The Washington Post felt it was "unambiguously atrocious, but in that very special, howlingly grandiose manner that only a filmmaker with visions of epic greatness working on a large scale with a multinational cast can achieve." Leonard Maltin rated the film a "BOMB", calling it a "militantly lugubrious bio of Salvatore Giuliano".
Producer McNall was personally disappointed by the film. "Given that The Sicilian was a descendant of Puzo's The Godfather," wrote McNall, "I had expected something with the same beauty, drama, and emotion. Cimino had shown with The Deer Hunter that he was capable of making such a movie. But he had failed." McNall even quoted Ebert's review in his appraisal of The Sicilian, "Ebert criticized the cast, the cinematography, the script, even the sound quality. He was right about all of it."
In his analysis of The Sicilian, Richard Brody of The New Yorker wrote:
"Cimino doesn't stint on the Western analogies, with horses and mountains and conflicts over land rights, and his image repertory is as vital and energetic as ever, but it's hard not to see a crisis of cinematic faith, a sense of narrowing possibilities, afflicting the film. The pageantry of a Communist march with red flags in the wilderness, the ancient clutter of a nobleman's study, the haunting mystery of streetlights through a car's rear window all ring with Cimino's enthusiastic inspiration, but the movie seems like a substitute for the director's visions at his most uninhibited. It plays mostly like a feature-length analogy, a sort of intellectual behind-the-scenes laboratory for another vast American movie that he couldn't have made at the time."
Vic Armstrong, who did stunts for the film, wrote in his memoir My Life as Indiana Jones, James Bond, Superman and Other Action Heroes: The True Adventures of the World's Greatest Stuntman, "I don't know quite what happened, because it was one of the greatest scripts ever and yet the end result was horrible."
Rotten Tomatoes gives The Sicilian a 10% "Rotten" rating, based on 20 reviews, with an average rating of 3.9/10.
