Verhoeven does not explore the dark side, but merely exploits it, and that makes all the difference in the world. [20 Mar 1992, Friday, p.C]

It has a lack of ambition and energy that is almost total: It's the most this movie can do to roll over and ask for a little more lotion on its back. [22 July 1987]

The confusing screenplay, by John Eskow and Richard Rush, makes a few fumbling attempts to get a plot going (Downey crash-lands and has to be rescued by Gibson; later, their CIA bosses try to frame them for drug smuggling), but mainly the movie tries to get by on attitude, which is a mistake when Mel Gibson is its main perpetrator. [10 Aug 1990]

In Harlem Nights, Eddie Murphy continues his one-man war against the female gender. Those women he doesn't kill outright are punched, maimed and slugged with garbage cans. But apparently they deserve it-there isn't a single female character in the film who isn't a prostitute. [17 Nov 1989, p.A]

None of the characters has been written with any personality, and none of the actors succeeds in discovering any. [05 Mar 1993]

Brooks' own timing as a director doesn't seem up to its usual snuff. Light-years stretch out between the set-up of a gag and its payoff, and for a director who has always depended on the quantity of his jokes rather than the quality, the gap is fatal. When a character is introduced as "Pizza the Hut," and then shown as a melting mass of mozzarella and tomato sauce, the result is to turn a fairly clever pun into something thuddingly obvious and vaguely nauseating. [24 Jun 1987, p.3]

A fatally compromised, half-realized execution. [ 10 Jul 1992]

The first starring vehicle for shock comic Andrew Dice Clay, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, turns out to be the kind of detective spoof worn out 30 years ago by Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, though refitted with salty language, graphic violence and an attitude toward women that makes the Marquis de Sade look like Phil Donahue. [11 Jul 1990, p.18]