Big Trouble

Never hysterically funny but scattered with pleasingly OTT moments and throwaway lines, it looks as if Cassavetes merely wanted a) to prove he could make a blandly stylish commercial piece, and b) the cash. Read full review

These isolated pockets of comic invention are balanced by long stretches of general choppiness in editing and pacing. Shot by shot, the movie is crisply staged and photographed, but the gags don`t work and the timing`s off in much of the aborted fun. Read full review

Director Cassavetes here applies his remarkable talent for social observation in a light-comedy context and creates one of the strangest, and in many ways most frustrating, screen comedies in recent years. Read full review

John Cassavetes has been making exquisitely personal films -- or agonizingly personal ones, depending on one's tastes -- for years now. Sometimes, they are intimate dramas (Faces, Husbands, A Woman Under the Influence). Sometimes, they are dark comedies in melodramatic dress (Gloria). And sometimes, as in the newly released Big Trouble, they are just a mess. [19 Apr 1986, p.D1]