Cadillac Man

Somehow I kept waiting for the movie to get back on track - to get back to the zany comedy I thought I'd been promised. My problems with Cadillac Man were probably inspired more by false expectations than by anything on the screen. Read full review

Cadillac Man does not stay long in territory pioneered by Arthur Miller, David Mamet and Mr. Levinson. It turns, rather awkwardly, into a hostage-situation comedy featuring a cuckolded young man named Larry (Tim Robbins). Read full review

While he's lying through his teeth or improvising a sales pitch that might save his skin, Williams is funny and convincing; but once he starts getting dewy-eyed and sincere, flesh-crawling embarrassment takes over. Read full review

Like Larry, Cadillac Man doesn't know quite what it wants to do. At first the film seems to be a low-key comedy about a small-time hustler, then it becomes a kind of Dog Day Afternoon-style melodrama. Ultimately it is an uneasy mix of the two. Read full review

In Cadillac Man, the new movie by Roger (No Way Out) Donaldson, Williams certainly has his share of Robin-esque rejoinders, but he never quite reaches the feverish sales pitch most of his fans are likely to expect. Read full review

Though there is an artist's instinct behind Cadillac Man-an instinct that does surface here and there, with a particularly piercing line of dialogue or powerful gesture-it`s quickly blotted out by the Williams formula. Read full review

A canny buyer will beware the blandishments of car salesmen, but it's a mystery why Robin Williams bought the inane script for Cadillac Man. [18 May 1990, p.E3]

Coarse and haphazardly engineered and never more than intermittently funny. Read full review

Even worse than it sounds. Read full review

Cadillac Man splutters briefly to life about two-thirds of its way through, but to sit until that moment, deafened by the movie's shrillness and embalmed by its humor, is a lot to ask of even the most amiable audience. [18 May 1990, p.F1]

Watching Robin Williams's new movie, Cadillac Man, spin hopelessly out of control, you know intuitively that there was no single storyteller at the wheel, but a committee of back-seat drivers inflating a small, decent idea into an incoherent, opportunistic concept. Trying desperately to speak to everyone, these star packages have no voice of their own. They're not really movies -- they're product. [28 May 1990, p.72]

Cadillac Man's beginning and ending are superb. (The hearse sequence is classic.) But the movie, like most of the salesmen's waists, sags heavily at its midpoint. [18 May 1990, p.6]