How to Get Ahead in Advertising

Robinson takes on a few too many satirical targets, but star Richard E. Grant gives a great over-the-top performance. It’s hard to dislike a film where a giant zit gets all the best lines. Read full review

Occasionally a bit preachy with its critique of advertising or the Eighties commodity mindset, this one's still relevant, and that's because Robinson isn't just trashing tactics -- he's trashing an entire industry. Read full review

If you like your movies with smooth skin, this might not be your cup of Neutrogena. But if you appreciate satire that reaches out and squeezes you where it hurts, you're going to enjoy yourself thoroughly. Read full review

How To Get Ahead in Advertising is loud, aggressive, and boisterously crude. But it has something serious on its mind, and that's more than can be said about many current films. [30 Jun 1989, p.10]

This British-made story of an advertising executive and the boil on his neck begins as a marketable concept comedy and turns into a combination psychological horror flick and thought- provoking parable. [10 Jul 1989, p.C5]

Robinson is more adept at the surrealism than the satire, and when the latter takes hold toward the end, the film falters; however, Grant doesn’t, and the film is worth a look if only for his fearless, funny work. Read full review

It vaults over rationality and tidy manners, over taste and proportion and, for that matter, the rules of dramatic structure. It's nuts, but nuts to an end. Read full review

The special effects are gruesomely convincing, and Robinson views the world of advertising with a characteristically sharp comic eye. [25 Jul 1989, p.29]

It's cruel, funny, knowing, never less than biting and occasionally brilliant. [05 May 1989]

The speeches reel on and on, talky and redundant, like an essay in a polemical magazine. Eventually we’ve had enough. The movie has everything it needs to be a successful satire on advertising, and more. Read full review

Until the end, when Robinson allows the lunacy to run into rant, the provocative Advertising adds up to frightful good fun. That is, if you’re not put off by accepting a preening pocket of pus as a leading man. Read full review

Robinson's impassioned decency and coruscating invective make "How to Get Ahead in Advertising" a high-minded, invigorating mess. [19 May 1989, p.47]

The leap from pointing out the hollow values of advertising to a full-scale attack on capitalism is broad, and in trying to make it, Robinson falls into an abyss of speciousness. Nevertheless, his intensely personal style and vision mark him as one of the most promising filmmakers working in England today. [12 May 1989, p.G]

The message is troweled on far too thickly at the end, but up to then, Robinson raises legitimate issues with a lively, sardonic and inventive sense of humor. [15 Jul 1989, p.C08]

The movie grows more and more desperate until it seems to go to pieces like poor brilliant Bagley. The final madness has less to do with wit than with a cinematic effect. The film's good humor, however, is consistent. Read full review

The opening half-hour is outrageously brilliant, but descends into a pot-boiler of repetitive, if animated, soapbox preaching about the manipulation of punters by the denziens of Madison Avenue and their international brotherhood. Read full review

More subtlety or quiet introspection might have lent greater credibility to the role, though Grant and Robinson unquestionably have made their point. Read full review

How To Get Ahead In Advertising is often an uneasy mixture of satire and parody that plunges past anarchy into the most foursquare polemic imaginable. But at least it has the courage of every one of its convictions and Grant's doughty performance at its centre almost persuades one that he was not a little miscast. [27 Jul 1989]

The picture would be genuinely hilarious were the subject matter not so overworked. Read full review

The battle of the heads in "How to Get Ahead in Advertising" is curious, bizarre and at times distasteful. The plot becomes almost existential, but the ending is a cop-out. [21 Nov 1989]

Pretty good entertainment, but not an outstanding time at the movies. [17 Aug 1989, p.6E]

A scabrous, somewhat wayward anti-80's rant that, whilst providing Grant with a few moments of high farce, lacks the wit and social surety of Withnail & I. Read full review