Cocktail (1988) Critic Reviews

The more you think about what really happens in Cocktail, the more you realize how empty and fabricated it really is.Read the full review

Near Cocktail's numbing end, viewers who are still awake will hear love interest Elisabeth Shue warn Cruise: "Your sexy little smile isn't going to work this time.'' Drink to that - a Bloody Mary to a bloody shame. [29 Jul 1988, p.4D]Read the full review

Cruise is walking in the footsteps of Troy Donahue and John Travolta here. He does what comes easy. He bumps and grinds and grins till his lips ache. It's a performance with all the integrity of wax fruit. And Cocktail is mud in your eye.Read the full review

Cocktail, which opens today at the Cinema 2 and other theaters, is ''Saturday Night Fever'' without John Travolta, the Bee-Gees and dancing. It is an inane romantic drama that only a very young, very naive bartender could love. How it got that way is difficult to understand.Read the full review

Arm wrestling and hamburger building have been exhausted as backgrounds for movies, so it was probably inevitable that bartending would be next. But nothing quite prepares you for the hamburger that Cocktail makes of an old and relatively honorable profession. [29 Jul 1988, p.14]Read the full review

There isn't a scene in Cocktail that isn't cheap and dumb, and whether its camp entertainment value compensates for its contempt for women is a question. Cocktail makes beer commercials look deep, makes "Top Gun" look like "Hamlet." [29 Jul 1988, p.21]Read the full review

Cocktail is unbelievable - a picture that sets itself up as a gritty, authentic character study but is laughable, false and stupid in all its details. The only connection to reality here is that there are actually such things as bartenders. [29 Jul 1988, p.E1]Read the full review