Can't Buy Me Love

Nice performances, a useful script and a dignified ending all boost this film's appeal, but it is the workable simplicity of the premise that really does it. Read full review

Can't Buy Me Love has an identity crisis that's a mirror-image of Ronald's own. He thinks he wants popularity at any price, though he's really a sincere guy. The film thinks it wants to be sincere, when all it truly wants is to be popular, just like the other kids' movies, so it sells off its originality. Read full review

The director has a feel for this shopping-with-Mummy's- plastic milieu, but the theme of peer group pressure and the almost universal human need for acceptance is compromised by a script of very Californian piety. Otherwise a slight but not unenjoyable movie. Read full review

Though it looks bright and the young actors have a couple of sweet moments, the picture is almost unremittingly punishing, hammering home its "be yourself" message with all the gentle persuasiveness of a Marine drill sergeant. Read full review

The movie isn't terribly well written, and the acting is rarely more than OK, but there's one character who brightens the screen. Seth Green plays Ronald's pain-in-the-neck kid brother Chuckie, and he's as droll as Frankie and Annette's kid in Back to the Beach. [14 Aug 1987, p.D5]

A John Hughes movie without Pretty in Pink director John Hughes, sure makes you appreciate the teens' auteur. Frankly, Steve Rash, who directs this copycat comedy, another nerd-gets-the-cheerleader romance, isn't fit to wear Hughes' hightops. Rash only tinkers with adolescent angst, without the progenitor's empathy for his audience. Read full review

The problem with Can't Buy Me Love is that too often characters do and say things teenagers wouldn't. At times this is a funny, touching film, but more often it isn't. Read full review

There's a moral to the new teen movie Can't Buy Me Love: Money can't buy popularity. But it seems to have been lost on the movie makers themselves. What are they doing here but trying to spend their way to audience approval, success and glory? The plot is another one-sentence gimmick, the jokes juvenile, the morality a sham. Read full review

Unfortunately, Can't Buy Me Love is not particularly funny. Rash is so concerned with exploring the abhorrent high school caste system - making a teen comedy with a conscience - that the story ultimately becomes leaden and pedantic. Add to this the movie's predictability at every turn, including an ever-so-tidy conclusion, and you end up with something that's little more than a nice try. [14 Aug 1987, p.3D]

Pitched Squarely to the teeny set, Can't Buy Me Love tacks a grade-school moral onto a high-school tale: be yourself, kiddies; don't follow the trendy crowd; popularity ain't what it's cracked up to be. Of course, it says all this while trying desperately to be the most popular flick since box met office. [14 Aug 1987]

Can't Buy Me Love makes American teenagers look like stupid and materialistic twits. That would be all right if the movie were aware of itself and knew what it was doing - if it were a satirical comment on our society. But this movie is as naive as the day is long. It doesn't have a thought in its head and probably no notion of the corruption at its core. Read full review