Metacritic reviews

Nonstop banter between the two stars is rowdy, intimate, natural and often very funny. Hyams keeps most of it fresh, including the action ending, staged within one of Chicago’s architectural spectacles, the cavernous, glass-enclosed Illinois State Building.

I liked the smaller-scale scenes the best, the ones where Hines and Crystal were doing their stuff.

With their sloppy slapstick and wet Menudo jokes, one only wonders why more people aren't out to kill them. But Crystal and Hines do flavour the film with genuine warmth, and despite some cheap gags, work well together to produce some truly funny moments.

Crystal and Hines are immediately likable on the screen, so the fact that Running Scared isn`t all that we expect must be due to the script. The film`s ending does leave room for a sequel. If one is made, director Hyams should get Crystal and Hines a better story as well as that bar in Florida.

Though a "summer" movie set in wintery Chicago might seem less than logical, this one does what good escapist fare should: loses you in a world with enough excitement and fun that surrender becomes easy. [27 June 1986, p.D1]

Running Scared's razor-crisp editing (by James Mitchell) shows that you can combine mayhem and laughs. But the action becomes huge, cartoony, out of scale, crushing the warmth Crystal and Hines have built up. And the movie is too long by about 15 minutes, a deadly thought for a comedy.

Hines and Crystal succeed in creating a new buddy team that ranks with the likes of Robert Redford and Paul Newman.

There is something disturbing in the way the film elevates cynicism and detachment into heroic attitudes.

Decent premises and the promise of Billy Crystal pale in a film that fronts up to, then whimpers away from, the prospect of leaping out of its genre's boundaries.

Still another, thoroughly depressing demonstration of the extent to which television now dictates the style and the manners of so many of the movies we see in theaters.