Wrong Is Right

There's a frenzied integrity to this wild and crazy movie that yells at us as a father yells at children who are playing with fire. [26 Apr 1982, p.75]

Veering wildly between a quite well-written satire on the contemporary American political scene and a very ham-fisted nuclear blackmail thriller, its sheer eccentricity is quite engaging.

Wrong Is Right represents Richard Brooks' shriek of protest at what he sees as the insane, downward spiral of world history over the past decade. Part political satire, part doomsday melodrama and part intellectual graffiti scribbled on the screen, film is impossible to pigeon-hole.

Wrong Is Right shows the comic subtlety of The Jeffersons on a slow night. Everything else may be topsy-turvy in the world, but unfunny still isn't funny even in the Oval Office. [15 May 1982]

Wrong Is Right tries to be an intellectual epic comedy thriller -- a bold mix, to say the least. But its force is muffled by its bulk. Despite its good intentions, it's a dud. [20 May 1982, p.19]

The film is rather haphazard in its visual style and plotting, tallying up to a confused condemnation of our lack of morality.

Mr. Brooks has a couple of major defects to be successful in this kind of project. He is a man with no great feeling for comedy of any sort, and his reactions to the lunacies of contemporary life are trivial.