Critic Reviews

• Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine

  Its tone swings violently from pratfall to preachment, from an indictment of featherbed laziness to an extended beer-commercial celebration of the mythical American worker.

• Variety Staff, Variety

  Drawn from real life, the conflict between cultures is good for both a laugh and a sober thought along the way.

• Derek Adams, Time Out

  The hero, though funny, is ultimately unsympathetic, securing through his cosy pacts nobody's position but his own, while the upbeat ending justifies strike-breaking. With comrades like this, who needs class enemies?

• Vincent Canby, New York Times

  It's more cheerful than funny, and so insistently ungrudging about Americans and Japanese alike that its satire cuts like a wet sponge.

• Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

  A disappointment, a movie in which the Japanese are mostly used for the mechanical requirements of the plot, and the Americans are constructed from durable but boring stereotypes.

• , TV Guide's Movie Guide

  Keaton is lovable, as usual, but he comes across as a dumb jerk. This was an obvious attempt at 1930s-type social comedy. Social it may have been; comedic it wasn't.

• Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice

  Delivers plenty of laughs and cross-cultural insights in this drama about the contrast between American and Japanese attitudes toward work.

• , Film4

  Howard appears to have learnt surprisingly little about comic timing during his long tenure on Happy Days, leaving his star with little to do but force an inane grin and hope for the best.

• Rob Vaux, Flipside Movie Emporium

  The stereotypes are too broad for comfort, despite some funny moments.

• Ken Hanke, Mountain Xpress (Asheville, NC)

  The sort of movie that makes you understand why you don't much see Keaton anymore.

• Jonathan R. Perry, Tyler Morning Telegraph (Texas)

  Ron Howard has as much business lamenting the death of the Rust Belt as Russ Meyer adapting Shakespeare -- and it shows.

• Scott Weinberg, eFilmCritic.com

  Check it out again and tell me if it still stands up. Keaton's performance aside, there's not much worth seeing.

Read all 12 critic reviews