Such soft fare that it makes your eyes feel gummy. Andrew Bergman's script has no comic tension and no thrills. [3 June 1985, p.65]

It's a shaggy-dog road movie, with all the team's usual ingredients but one -- it's not funny. There's no fresh insight in Things Are Tough All Over, little of their surrealist pothead non sequiturs, and to see them through, they've begun to fall back on tired, conventional sight gags -- a car going through a carwash with its top down, Cheech hiding in a spinning laundermat dryer. [6 Sept 1982, p.75]

All shots and no scenes, which is nice for a picture book but deadly for drama.

The film suffers dearly because of the two underwritten, emotionally unavailable characters at the film's center and when all is revealed at an amateur dance contest, the music — and the modicum of tension the movie has created — dies.

Though it tells us that it's about a man who gives pleasure for a living but is incapable of accepting pleasure, it is in fact about the guilty obsessions of a filmmaker who seems incapable of giving pleasure to an audience. [11 Feb 1980, p.82]

So bland and un-lived in you want to pour Tabasco all over the screen.

Just about everything in Turner & Hooch is predictable, and the one thing that isn't is unforgivable...Turner & Hooch is expertly executed dreck. [14 Aug 1989, p.56]

Everyone in the film is either annoying or unpleasant.

A "croc" of nonsense.

Though an expensive production, padded out with special effects and side- trips to Nepal, it fails to achieve any grandeur or dash. Murphy seems to be present mainly to mock the film's pretentions and shoddy plotting, as if the producers deliberately had chosen a piece of third-rate pulp, pumped millions of dollars into it, and then brought in Murphy to make them look stupid. [22 Dec 1986, p.75]

Even Hudson's greatest fans will concede that storytelling has never been his strongest suit. But watching his latest effort -- a big, grittily handsome epic full of grand landscapes and painterly images of fallen soldiers -- one has the disconcerting feeling that the real drama is happening somewhere else, just out of Hudson's sight, in one of the many crucial scenes that have been left out of the movie...There may be a smashing movie on the cutting-room floor, but what's on screen is a shambles. [30 Dec 1985, p.62]

The foreboding, dark camera-work is effective in setting the mood for this sinister, eye- popping, frequently ridiculous thriller.

What was a ragged but often hilarious charmer has been genetically altered into a deafening and desperate mutant.

I staggered out of this shameless, interminable movie feeling as if I'd been force-fed a ton of mealy, artificially sweetened baby food.

Save yourself from this mess.

The first half concerns our hero's satirical misadventures on earth, except that director Huyck has the comic finesse of Hulk Hogan. The second half is an overproduced orgy of car crashes and monsters, in which Howard must save the world from the Dark Overlords of the universe. George Lucas was the executive producer. The Force was not with him. [25 Aug 1986, p.63]

Unfortunately, the strong ensemble cast is not able to hold together this often wayward and meandering story.

Hampered by a silly plot and flat script.

A tired, confused romantic comedy/noir thriller with all the suspense of an infomercial. Buy the poster; skip the movie.

The creepy subtext of his (Sandler's) behavior is something this crude, mirthless comedy tries not to notice.

The indignities inflicted on the Chester family by writers Jeremy Stevens and Mark Reisman are barely clever enough to sustain a half-hour TV show. Carl Reiner directed this tepid farce, as if half asleep. [26 Aug 1985, p.62]

If this is what Hollywood considers serious, important filmmaking, maybe the movie industry should stick to the low road.

Since we've lost our innocence, our "fun" movies have to be smarter than they used to be. Now that we're so much better informed and more miserable than we were a generation ago, dumbness is no longer charming for its own sake. But CAPRICORN ONE is just too dumb to be fun. We know too much about space shots, astronauts and moonwalks to swallow the dopey implausibility with which writer-director Peter Hyams tells his story of how sinister forces fake the first manned landing on Mars... But Brolin, Waterston and Simpson are just jump-suited dummies. O.J. displays more style, wit and grace in a one-minute Hertz commercial than he's allowed to show in this entire flick. [19 June 1978, p.75]

A sad spectacle: it feels like an advertisement, but what is left to sell? [27 Dec 1982, p.62]

Screenwriter Ropelewski piles one silly plot contrivance upon another, and the characters start behaving like nitwits.

That this relentless barrage of psychological and physical torture is extremely well made and powerfully performed--Watts hurls herself into her physically demanding role with heroic conviction--somehow makes it worse.

About as bad as it gets?a thrill-less "Speed" wannabe.

The flick's ultimate flaw? For a movie about space travel, it's an awfully uninspired trek.