Avis Metacritic

Mostly pretty silly and uncertain whether to be tongue-in-cheek, it has one or two good scenes and some intriguing hardware, including the Looker (Light Ocular Oriented Kinetic Energetic Responsers) disorientation gun.

The premise, though, is the only satisfying thing about Looker, which Mr. Crichton has directed from his own original, stupifyingly nonsensical screenplay.

Writer-director Michael Crichton has used interesting material, public manipulation by computer-generated TV commercials, to create Looker, a silly and unconvincing contempo sci-fi thriller.

As dumb as Looker is, it's not dull, and Crichton does pull off one very funny sequence--a black comic climax in which corpses and commercials become hilariously intertwined. lt should have been a skit on "Second City Television." [2 Nov 1981, p.108]

This picture seems ingenious at the start, but Crichton can't write people, and he directs like a technocrat. This is the emptiest of his pictures to date.

[A]confusing, silly story.

Why are movies about sophisticated technology and hidden persuaders and subliminal seduction - Agency is the other example that springs immediately to mind - so technically sloppy, so incapable of persuading even the smallest child of their plausibility and so utterly unable to seduce someone dying to be ravished by a well-made thriller? [2 Nov 1981]

In a glaring case of the pot insulting the kettle, the Michael Crichton film Looker keeps sneering at television for being mindless and lascivious trash. Actually, "Looker" is so mindless it doesn't even justify its own silly premise, and so lascivious that it keeps announcing that its own collection of indistinguishably bland starlets represents physical perfection. [30 October 1981, p.17]

Despite formidable competition, Looker makes a persuasive case for Stinker of the Year among suspense thrillers. [30 Oct 1981, p.C6]