Metacritic reviews

Big laughs, foul language to the point of absurdity and one hilarious, screaming performance atop another combine to make Wise Guys one of the funniest times you will have at the movies this year.

Wise Guys is an abundant movie, filled with ideas and gags and great characters. It never runs dry. It never has the desperation of so many gangster comedies, which seem to be marching over the same tired ground. This movie was made with joy, and you can feel it in the sense of all the actors working at the top of their form.

From its cartoony credits to its knish-and-cannoli close, Wise Guys is one funny movie.

Directed by Brian De Palma with an uncharacteristic twinkle in his eye, the film offers such a likable gallery of cement-heads that we're in no mood to carp about the movie's creaky storyline, belabored gags or meandering chase scenes.

The macho bluster taken seriously in De Palma’s gorgeous but uninterestingly pumped-up Elliott Ness saga is here intriguingly skewered.

Wise Guys, a surprisingly sweet, but sluggish Mafia farce, teams easy-going Joe Piscopo with driven, dangerous Danny De Vito in a neo-Abbott and Costello Meet the Godfather.

Some great laughs, but it isn't hard to see why the film was never released theatrically in Britain: at times it just gets bogged down with over-the-top performances. The ending is great, though.

Often funny, though just as often tasteless.

Ponderous, predictable, and unfunny, this gangster comedy was directed by Brian De Palma, though apart from a few of his characteristic symmetry gags in the opening sequences, it's indistinguishable from the work of any average TV hack.

Wise Guys proves that a tone deaf, dumb-ass comedy with a bunch of nifty split diopter shots is still a tone deaf, dumb-ass comedy, and for all its frenetic energy it can’t muster much enthusiasm in those watching.