Red Dawn

MGM/UA Entertainment Company | Release Date: August 10, 1984

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

53	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 15 Critic Reviews

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Kirk Ellis

It packs plenty of rabble-rousing ammunition, but its sloppy execution is unlikely to win any merit badges for marksmanship. Read full review

Keith Phipps

As an action movie, Red Dawn is a repetitive headache, and anyone with Blue State sympathies will be appalled at its manipulations and exaggerations. But there's smart subtext beneath the big dumb explosions. Read full review

Gary Arnold

Milius and his co-writer, Kevin Reynolds, commit a fatal blunder by jumping into combat sequences before we've scarcely had time to take in the idyllic heartland setting, a rural Colorado town called Calumet. [10 Aug 1984, p.B4]

Jack Kroll

The film is too dumb to work as patriotic exhortation and too mawkish to work as blood-and-guts exploitation. It's a long commercial in which the Marlboro Man has become the American Guerrilla, with his good buddies, good guns and a bottomless case of Coors. [03 Sep 1984, p.73]

Rita Kempley

Director John Milius, the barbarian behind Conan, co-wrote this anti-gun-control, anti- Communist, survivalist script with Kevin Reynolds. Sick and silly as it is, the idea could have been intriguing, had it gone anywhere, which it didn't. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

Red Dawn charges off to an exciting start as a war picture and then gets all confused in moralistic handwriting, finally sinking in the sunset. Swayze, Howell and the other youngsters are all good in their parts.

Staff (Not Credited)

Paranoia can of course be an excellent dynamic for movie-makers, and within its own dream-like structure, Red Dawn is both compelling and witty (the town's drive-in becomes a 're-education camp'). But it also contains moments that are repulsive in the grand right wing tradition, all the more so since Milius, who once held the fascination of a rebel, is here voicing sentiments that the Reagan administration actually believes. Read full review

Janet Maslin

Red Dawn may be rabidly inflammatory, but it isn't dull. Mr. Milius does know how to keep a story moving. He might well have turned this into a genuinely stirring war film, if he had not also made it so incorrigibly gung-ho. But the effectiveness of its chilling premise, from a story by Kevin Reynolds, is dissipated by wildly excessive directorial fervor at every turn. Read full review

EmpireKim Newman

Red Dawn is at once a mainstream shoot ‘em up action picture and an ideologically demented exercise in American paranoia. Read full review