Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) | Release Date: June 24, 1987 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
4
Mixed:
5
Negative:
5
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Critic Reviews
Spaceballs has the happy air of a comic enterprise that knows it's going right. It just keeps spritzing the gags at us, Borscht Belt-style, confidently and rightly sensing that if we don't laugh at this one, we'll laugh at the next. And so we do. After a long dry spell, Brooks is back on the money with Spaceballs. [24 Jun 1987, p.33]
The movie's dialogue is constructed out of funny names, puns and old jokes. Sometimes it's painfully juvenile. But there are some great visual gags in the movie, and the best is Pizza the Hutt, a creature who roars and cajoles while cheese melts off its forehead and big hunks of pepperoni slide down its jowls.
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A lot of the gags are pretty good. It's not that Star Wars is less worthy of satire than horse opera or gothic horror. It's not that Mel Brooks has lost his cunning, though he does need a freedom of speech not to be found under a PG rating. What's missing is that zany old gang of his. There is simply nobody like them on this trip. [13 July 1987, p.68]
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]
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