True Colors

The don't-get-caught '80s and holier-than-thou '90s do battle in True Colors, a political drama of all-too familiar dimensions. The painstakingly obvious screenplay by Kevin Wade (Working Girl) plays like an eighth-grade civics primer: ethics and morality are good, greed and corruption are bad. Read full review

True Colors requires more than the willing suspension of disbelief; it demands a willful abandonment of incredulity. Read full review

As directed by Mr. Ross, True Colors is dreary, humorless, heavy-handed and self-important. Read full review

True Colors rushes by at a hectic pace, never allowing the story to gain momentum. Despite good performances from the two leads, the film has the feel of a cautionary stampede. While it aspires to lofty heights, it never really goes much beyond the rules of behavior prescribed by the Boy Scout Handbook. Read full review

Spader and Cusack go through the motions as political sparring partners in this coming of age drama. Read full review

The movie does have the gifted Spader, superb in the thankless role of the Good One. The lightweight Cusack, however, doesn’t have the authority to play an incipient demagogue. His juvenile performance turns True Colors hopelessly monochromatic. Read full review

Movies about political corruption generally bog down in moralistic quicksands. Few American films have the courage to take their cynicism to the limit, and True Colors is no exception. This Capra-corny reliance on the ultimate sagacity of The People doesn’t jibe with the film’s fine edge of avarice. Tim is righteousness incarnate, and Spader can’t seem to pull a performance out of all that goodness. He is uncomfortably upstanding in the role. He looks as though he would rather swap roles with Cusack. Read full review

As with many Hollywood films before it, TRUE COLORS is a film with no discernable reason for existence, apart from the sheer joy of the filmmaking process itself. Far from being its own reward, however, the film is a dull, unreasonable cypher. Read full review

Along with Cusack's marvelously natural performance, True Colors offers a premise deeper than most twentysomething-audience movies. The ethical conflicts between Spader and Cusack are thought-provoking, if simplistic and exaggerated. At the same time, True Colors seems to scream Cultural Statement. It's self-consciously anthemic. [26 Apr 1991, p.74]

The setup is so startlingly unlike the rest of True Colors, so moody and visually ambiguous, that it hits you both with the force of the moment and with regret for what this movie might have been. [05 Apr 1991, p.D]

The film, which has an overly complicated script (by Kevin Wade), is like Wall Street minus Gordon Gekko. It takes the fun out of back-room political sleaziness — and out of political integrity, too. Read full review

True Colors is obvious and heavy-handed, loaded with cliches, and never really seems to inhabit the world in which it is set -- Washington politics. But more than just being mediocre, there's something obnoxious about the movie. It's a look at the ethics of the generation that came of age in the 1980s, presented by an older generation that has no more insight, sympathy or understanding of its subject than Gramps had of Woodstock. [12 Apr 1991, p.E1]

The film is not very convincing as sociology, but it is mildly amusing as comedy, has an unpolished charm to its visuals and performances, and showcases so many rock songs on its soundtrack that it qualifies as a musical. [19 Apr 1991]

The politics of 1980s are certainly due for an examination in American film. But True Colors isn't it. [19 Apr 1991, p.27]

There's the germ of a sexy idea in True Colors, which serves up a duplicitous friendship, Capitol Hill intrigue and even attractive scenery (indoors and out). Too bad some folks have disinfected it. [15 Mar 1991, p.4D]

Strip away the transparent moral shading, erase the buddy-picture twist, and True Colors is nothing more than a watered-down mix of Wall Street and The Candidate, a sentimental variation on a sentimental model. [15 Mar 1991]

True Colors represents a cloyingly schematic attempt to portray the political and moral bankruptcy of the 1980s in a neat little package. Pic condemns but doesn't begin to analyze the corrupted values of the Reagan years, leaving one feeling soiled but unenlightened. Read full review