Most critics like it, and nearly all of them like it for the same reason: the acting. Jack Nicholson’s Melvin is the draw, a misanthrope whose tirades and compulsions are made watchable, even sympathetic, by the performance, and several reviews argue that Helen Hunt’s waitress is the better piece of work. Beyond the cast, the praise goes to James L. Brooks’s dialogue: barbed, quick, and funny enough to carry a mean comedy towards warmth without ringing false.
The reservations are about everything around the performances. The film is called too long, sitcom-like in its rhythms, and predictable in its arc, with a happy ending that even admirers describe as a compromise. The spread is wide. Variety finds the tonal shifts messy and the characters tiresome; The New Yorker finds it manipulative; The Times says it leans on Nicholson’s familiar tics and spoon-feeds sentiment. Radio Times calls the direction lazy and still recommends it.