Directed By:Clint Eastwood
Written By:Boaz Yakin, Scott Spiegel
The Rookie
Metascore
Mixed or Average
41
User score
Mixed or Average
5.3
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Top Cast
Metascore
Mixed or Average
21% Positive
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
32% Mixed
6 Reviews
6 Reviews
47% Negative
9 Reviews
9 Reviews
75
The Rookie is a generally enjoyable variation on some extremely familiar themes, filled out with the most spectacular action sequences Eastwood has ever filmed and a good dose of the dyspeptic humor that is becoming the hallmark of his late career as an actor. [07 Dec 1990, p.C]
63
There's action aplenty in The Rookie, but director and star Clint Eastwood supplies his tired cop-buddy formula with an oddball tone that lifts it slightly above the genre. [07 Dec 1990, p.53p]
User score
Mixed or Average
36% Positive
5 Ratings
5 Ratings
50% Mixed
7 Ratings
7 Ratings
14% Negative
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
Mar 23, 2020
7
The Rookie is a 1990 action, crime thriller and is an okay film but not the best. I give it a seven rating merely on the grounds of the film actually being funny in some parts and the good action scenes and I think Clint Eastwood and Charlie Sheen get along pretty well even if at times it feels the opposite sometimes in the movie the chemistry between the two is hilariously great and I love it. Clint Eastwood plays some cop called Nick Pulovski who's teamed up with some young rookie played by Charlie Sheen after the death of Clint Eastwood's partner by Raul Julia and his team of nasties. Rail Julia is the villain but The Rookie does deliver some hilarious moments and great acting and violence and bad language and the actors are all great but could be of been better and sort of has a buddy cop feel to it. Directed by Clint Eastwood I'd say The Rookie is okay but not the best movie around but it could of been so much worse.
Feb 4, 2022
6
Decent action flick, rubbish buddy cop movie. The reason for the latter is that Clint Eastwood and Charlie Sheen just don't really work as a pairing, when I think of great buddy cop duos - see the preceding 'Lethal Weapon' or the succeeding 'Rush Hour' - I always recall the banter and that the two are subconsciously looking out for each other. Here, it just felt like Eastwood and Sheen weren't connected - despite being policing partners. The action elements help raise this film from the depths though, as all the set pieces and stuff like that come off - there's one scene that Michael Bay would love, I'm sure. The support cast are alright too, I recognised - among one or two others - Xander Berkeley and Tony Plana. Despite those (minor) positives, the initially mentioned parts override them in 'The Rookie'. These type of films need to make you love watching the two leads together, but here I simply didn't - they make for an average partnership, at best.
50
What The Rookie feels like is an assembly of scenes that were not attached to characters we can care about. The dialogue is wooden, or artificial, or self-consciously cute. Most of the characters are not given even perfunctory development.
40
The Rookie is an astonishingly empty movie to come from Mr. Eastwood.
38
Eastwood also directed, in a plodding, heavy-handed style that leaves little to the imagination and less to the sense of humor. Every scene is as predictable as the chase that precedes or follows it. [07 Dec 1990, p.3F]
30
Overlong, sadistic and stale even by the conventions of the buddy pic genre.
20
Only Sheen's hysterically inept handling of the godawful dialogue relieves the boredom.
Jul 23, 2020
4
While I think that, on the whole, the man's filmography ranges from "meh" ("Absolute Power," "Hereafter, "etc.) to "terrific" ("Million Dollar Baby," "Gran Torino," etc.) this particular Eastwood-directed movie is hard to apologize for. I'd probably even go so far as to say it's the worst one I've seen yet. "The Rookie's" first half plays out like what you sort of expect a movie on the lower end of the Eastwood entertainment spectrum to feel like. Slow, understated, but with some minor moments of levity and fun scattered about. The second half, however, takes a flying leap down the drain, as we're all of a sudden introduced to a whole host of new problems. Filled out with some frustratingly incongruous plotting, some truly horrific bit character acting and one of the most head-scratchingly out-of-place and unnecessary scenes I've ever seen in a movie like this, it almost felt like the second half of this was like a cry for help. My general rule of thumb with Eastwood movies is this — they're only as good as their script, because Clint (God, love him) sure isn't going to polish a turd with his admittedly by-the-numbers directorial style. And boy, oh, boy, what a turd this script is.
