Most critics like it, though not with much heat. Six of the eleven are positive, and the praise gathers around Matthew Broderick, whose breezy, likeable performance nearly every admirer treats as the reason the film works. Hughes gets credit for skewering the school authorities, for the Chicago locations, and for Cameron’s story, which the warmer reviews say gives the comedy more weight than its thin premise suggests.
The spread is wide. Three reviews are flatly negative, and their complaint is the same: Ferris himself. The Los Angeles Times finds him too smug and invincible, Time Out wishes someone had confronted him, and Slant reads the film as a celebration of upper-middle-class entitlement. Variety finds no plot at all. Even the sceptics enjoy Jeffrey Jones as the principal, and The AV Club, revisiting it, calls it engaging but unfunny comfort food. The objections come from 1986 and from later reappraisals alike, so this is not simply a film that has dated.