Dartherer I really don't get the hype.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Numerootno A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Tango and Cash In a word: annoying!For the first 45 minutes or so I kept asking myself, "Why? What does he get out of this?" A stupid science experiment and a "story" for the girl he likes. Thing is - neither of those things happen! The girl, sensibly, ends up saying "Uh, this is a bad idea." And he never even gets to do the science experiment thing, or whatever that was. Stupid movie. Another case of some douche being annoying in a typical 80s kind of way.John Lithgow is in it, he was OK. A young, cute, heterosexual Cynthia Nixon is in it. The dad from Frasier is in it, I don't even know his name or care what it is. A movie for an afternoon nap. Hopefully you fall asleep quickly so you don't have to see too much of it.4/10

Michael Neumann Here's a textbook example of all the post-'ET' rip-offs pitting bright teenagers against bad grown-ups, in this case packaged like an updated manual of mid-1980s commercial movie-making clichés. It's all here: the playful young smart-aleck prodigy (with attractive single mother and sexually active girlfriend); the wicked agents of federal bureaucracy; the solitary, sympathetic adult (as usual, a scientist); lots of distracting high-tech hardware; and a topical message. In more talented hands all these familiar ingredients might at least have been assembled with some style, but the comedy (?) plot (about the whiz-kid and his home built nuclear device) includes more lapses in logic, more contrived cleverness, and more implausible plot twists than even a teenage fantasy of this sort can support. Rule of thumb: never trust a movie that assumes its audience is less intelligent than the characters on screen.

n_r_koch Anti-Gravity Belts and Shrinking Rays are okay...unless you are making grandiose references to Oppenheimer and portentious speeches about real nuclear weapons on real planets where they can be made only with two really toxic materials. But even if plutonium could really be stored in sports bottles in a transparent case in a room with where a guy plays with lasers, one can't help but wonder: Why did the boy genius walk out of the lab but then drive the plutonium out of it in a remote-controlled car after cutting a hole in the building with the laser? Didn't anyone notice the hole he left in the building, the fence, and in the line of trees beyond the fence? Would all the world's super-pure plutonium be guarded by an old coot who appears to be legally blind and a thick besides? Why does Cynthia Nixon ask all their friends to drive to where a nuclear bomb is? Why does Paul need a written statement about the pure plutonium lab if he has the pure plutonium himself? Why does Paul's Mom forget to shampoo? Oh, that one actually does get answered.There are too many howlers to believe in this thing. It came from the same guy who wrote SLEEPER, in which the nonsense science was part of the comedy. WAR GAMES is more plausible but it ends with the same silly speeches. Of course if you ever do rid the world of nuclear weapons you merely make the first new weapon all the more valuable. Oh, well. Maybe a comedy about plutonium is a job no writer can manage.

bvallely We are asked to respect a high school kid(Paul Stephens who builds a nuclear bomb, and admire how he lightheartedly carts said device in a science fair, endangering the lives of literally tens of thousands people. If this "comedy" had been a wacky, Marx Brothers/Airport type farce, that wouldn't have bothered me in the slightest. But is "comedy" (which doesn't contain a single laugh)insists that we admire the arrogant little creep. I kept wishing that Jack Bauer would come in and shove a knife in Paul's kneecap.Marshal Brickman never directed a feature film after this, and I can't wonder why.