Big Business

Midler gets to play her vulgar, trashy self twice over, Tomlin introduces a little comic variety as the gutsy blue collar worker and the drippy sister, and Abrahams handles the mechanical plot with skill, if not style. The frenetic fun reduces everyone to a cipher; it's difficult to care about any of them. Read full review

You can convince yourself you're having a good time watching Big Business. The idea seems so funny you smile in anticipation of the jokes, but the laughter is strangely tinny. It's a harmless concoction, but so mechanical it vanishes from your head the instant it's over. It should have been so much more. [13 Jun 1988, p.74]

The film often looks third class, and the director, Jim Abrahams, doesn't have the knack of making the details click into place. You're aware of an awful lot of mistaken-identity plot and aware of how imprecise most of it is. Yet the picture moves along, spattering the air with throwaway gags, and a minute after something misfires you're laughing out loud.

If there’s anything worse than a long, slow, boring buildup to a payoff, it’s the buildup without the payoff. This movie doesn’t feel finished. Read full review

This classic comedy of errors is over-structured by cousin-writers Dori Pierson and Marc Rubel and mechanically laid out by director Jim Abrahams. Read full review

It's too smoothly controlled to be funny, which is Big Business's problem as a whole. [10 Jun 1988, p.A]

Some scenes in a Manhattan hotel have the amiable ring of old-fashioned farce to them, but most of the going is noisy and obvious. [10 Jun 1988, p.21]

Ultimately lost in it's own contrivances, Big Business still manages a few laughs thanks to it's big name leading lady. Read full review

A shrill, unattractive comedy. Read full review

Director Abrahams, working on his own for the first time, has some problems with pacing and with sustaining an essentially one-joke premise that never arrives at its big payoff. Read full review