Major Payne

Payne is played in the movie by Damon Wayans, in the best work he's done since the inspired "In Living Color" TV series. Read full review

While Major Payne is too predictable for most adults, it's an ideal entertainment for youthful audiences that allows Damon Wayans to be at his best in a dream part. Read full review

The hero's hilarious efforts to become an ROTC commander at a Virginia prep school are more than enough ammunition for this riotous military parody. Read full review

It’s relatively foolproof light entertainment, undone only when it strays too far into the absurd or wears the mantle of Wayans’ comedy persona. Read full review

Major Payne takes about an hour and 10 minutes before it wallows in sappiness. That's not a bad record for a formula family comedy in which the ending is clear from the start. Read full review

Predictable and ultimately saccharine, but occasionally enlivened by Wayans's rather vicious comic sensibility. Read full review

The title is exactly the sort of juvenile joke the entire movie leans on. Read full review

Basically what we've got here is talent spending itself on something tired, pointless and unrewarding. [24 March 1995, p.60]

Deeply crude as an overused latrine and defiantly non-P.C., the best you can say about the aptly titled Major Payne is that it's somewhat more tolerable than star Damon Wayans' last fumbled effort, the also well-named Blankman. [24 March 1995, p.8D]

What there is here is Damon Wayans ripping up the screen -- which is entertaining but doesn't go far enough -- but this film really isn't about anything else. My 4 1/2 year old cracked up at the butt jokes but doesn't know what “turd” means so he missed much of the verbal humor. Read full review

This fumbling and formulaic semiremake of The Private War of Major Benson (1955) is basically just an excuse to let comic Damon Wayans—functioning here as cowriter and executive producer as well as star—strut his stuff. But he's strutting in a void, and not even two gold teeth will light his way. The initial premise [is] good for a couple of laughs at most. Read full review

It's so much a Wayans vehicle that at times it seems like one long close-up of his gold-tooth grin. [24 March 1995, p.H24]

Major Payne is tasteless throughout and rarely funny. Mostly it's embarrassing. And the profanities littered copiously through the film are an upsetting clash with the level of humor, which seems directed to young teens. [24 March 1995, p.2B]

The whole grand tradition of the humor of movie stupidity, from Laurel and Hardy and Mortimer Snerd to Jerry Lewis and Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, seems to crash and burn in this movie, which ends with Payne's idiotic laugh wheezing away over the end-titles. It almost sounds like the beginning of a laugh track-which "Major Payne" could certainly use. [24 March 1995, p.H]

No fewer than seven writers were recruited to create the story and screenplay for Major Payne, a textbook demonstation of how more can produce less - in this case, a comedy that has all the brio and wit of an army training manual on personal hygiene. [27 March 1995, p.D02]

Wayans will do anything for a laugh, and twice if necessary. If Carrey wears a broken front tooth in Dumb and Dumber, Wayans has two front teeth capped with gold. If Carrey sells a dead bird to a blind child, Wayans shaves the heads of a blind boy and his seeing-eye dog. [24 March 1995]

It’s an unmitigated nightmare of crude, boorish tripe-and woe unto our nation’s future if kids find it hilarious. Read full review

A cynically made, painfully long comedy without a single laugh. It's a film to really make you wonder about Damon Wayans ' abilities as a comic actor. Read full review