How to Get Ahead in Advertising

Robinson takes on a few too many satirical targets, but star Richard E. Grant gives a great over-the-top performance. It’s hard to dislike a film where a giant zit gets all the best lines.

If you like your movies with smooth skin, this might not be your cup of Neutrogena. But if you appreciate satire that reaches out and squeezes you where it hurts, you're going to enjoy yourself thoroughly.

It vaults over rationality and tidy manners, over taste and proportion and, for that matter, the rules of dramatic structure. It's nuts, but nuts to an end.

Robinson's impassioned decency and coruscating invective make "How to Get Ahead in Advertising" a high-minded, invigorating mess. [19 May 1989, p.47]

How To Get Ahead In Advertising is often an uneasy mixture of satire and parody that plunges past anarchy into the most foursquare polemic imaginable. But at least it has the courage of every one of its convictions and Grant's doughty performance at its centre almost persuades one that he was not a little miscast. [27 Jul 1989]

Pretty good entertainment, but not an outstanding time at the movies. [17 Aug 1989, p.6E]

A scabrous, somewhat wayward anti-80's rant that, whilst providing Grant with a few moments of high farce, lacks the wit and social surety of Withnail & I.