Metacritic-Rezensionen

Pare lacks charisma as Eddie, but the Bruce Springsteen-like music (by John Cafferty, who dubs Eddie's singing voice, and his Beaver Brown Band) was good enough to put the soundtrack album in the Top 40 charts.

Low key and, despite the music, rather likeable.

Vivid, full of conviction and more than a little foolish at times.

Eddie And The Cruisers is a hodgepodge of seemingly unmarketable ingredients: a complicated flashback structure, oblique nods to Elvis Presley conspiracy theories and The Beach Boys’ unreleased opus Smile, and anachronistic Bruce Springsteen-style frat-rock.

Eddie and the Cruisers is all buildup and no payoff.

Whatever goodwill the movie builds up during its first 85 minutes is thrown away in the idiotic, anticlimactic final ten.

A few times, when Eddie and the Cruisers are making their music, the movie begins to hook you. But less-than-skillful plotting always lets you off the hook, and the ending is a letdown and a tease. [26 Sept 1983, p.6]

It seemed to me that what Eddie and the Cruisers aspired to do was certainly worth doing. The problem is that it finally lacks the storytelling resources to tell enough of an intriguing story about a musical mystery man. [30 Sept 1983, p.E2]

In the race to make that great rock and roll movie in the sky, Eddie and the Cruisers is a pit stop. [24 Sept 1983]

A mish-mash of a film, combining elements of the ongoing nostalgia for rock music of previous decades with an unworkable and laughable mystery plotline.