"Lisa Schwarzbaum of "Entertainment Weekly" graded the film B- and commented, "Richard Donner ... switches the movie from a really interesting, jittery, literate, and witty tone poem about justified contemporary paranoia (and the creatively unhinged dark side of New York City) to an overloaded, meandering iteration of a "Lethal Weapon" project that bears the not-so-secret stamp of audience testing and tinkering.