Southern Comfort

EMI Distribution | Release Date: September 25, 1981

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

63	METASCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 15 Critic Reviews

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

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Critic Reviews

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Ben Sachs

Stripping these characters to their essences, Hill identifies a shared culture of hatred that unites a range of Americans. Read full review

Roger Ebert

Southern Comfort is a film of drum-tight professionalism. It is also, unfortunately, so committed to its allegorical vision that it never really comes alive as a story about people. Read full review

Noel Murray

Beyond its genre roots and its deeper meanings, Southern Comfort is a well-honed study of characters and setting. Read full review

EmpireIan Nathan

A war film without the war but with some interesting observations nonetheless. Read full review

100

The GuardianPhilip French

It's an allegory about the Vietnam war, a study of American character and a national propensity for violence. Southern Comfort is a masterpiece. Read full review

Vincent Canby

Though the film was photographed on what appear to have been extremely difficult locations in Louisiana and Texas, it never once convinces you that it's anything but pretentious moviemaking. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

Arguably writer-director Walter Hill's best film to date, Southern Comfort works both as a pure action film and as an extremely effective allegory of America's involvement in Vietnam. Read full review

Chuck Bowen

Southern Comfort is a thriller that twists one up in knots, whipping the audience up to a point where they may wish that director Walter Hill would just spring the damn gore already so as to relieve the tension he masterfully coils. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

Straight-line conflicts, low-light visuals: the film's basics, its strengths, and its critical Achilles' heel are all those of the classic American male action movie. Read full review

Tom Watson

The latent wonder of Southern Comfort lies in Hill’s dangerously direction and a script that spits and curses like a troop of undomesticated delinquents. Read full review

David Ansen

At times Southern Comfort seems like a kind of war game itself--an academic exercise, perfectly executed but a little cut and dried. Still, it's an exercise passed with flying colors. The objective is sighted, the mission accomplished, the audience properly pummeled. [05 Oct 1981, p.78]

Gary Arnold

Southern Comfort sets up a potentially compelling switch on The Most Dangerous Game, but Hill's tactical maneuvers prove too diffuse and uncoordinated to carry out a successful variation. [16 Oct 1981, p.B1]

Jay Scott

The specifics of Hill's movie - and despite its straining for universality, it is all specifics - come approximately a decade too late; in the wake of Who'll Stop the Rain and Apocalypse Now (and even that great B-movie anti-war movie, The Big Red One), it sinks like an insignificant stone. [24 Oct 1981]

Pauline Kael

Walter Hill has a dazzling competence as an action director; he uses the locale for its paranoia-inducing strangeness (it suggests Vietnam), and he uses the men to demonstrate what he thinks it takes to survive. Its limitation is that there's nothing underneath the characters' macho masks.

Staff (Not Credited)

Pic is most exciting as a visual experience, as Walter Hill once again proves himself a consummate filmmaker with a great talent for mood, composition and action choreography. Read full review