Metacritic reviews

This is a movie in the true tradition of film noir -- which someone who didn't write a dictionary once described as a movie where an ordinary guy indulges the weak side of his character, and hell opens up beneath his feet.

Because Johnny Handsome is a film by Walter Hill (The Warriors, Streets of Fire), it crams the following things into its first five minutes: gunfire, screeching brakes, a drug-popping hoodlum, a moll in black leather, a violent robbery, one murder, sinister masks, shattering glass. But because this is Mr. Hill's work, these ingredients are slapped together with high style.

Walter Hill's "Johnny Handsome" feels like a shiv jammed between your ribs in a prison-yard fight. It's clean and brutal and so ruthlessly efficient that it's opened a hole in you almost before you've realized it.

Johnny Handsome may lapse into downbeat formula, but its acting is pungent, and, in the case of Barkin and Henriksen, as immediate as a razor slash. [29 Sep 1989, p.34]

This is a B-movie through and through, and no less fun for that. [29 Sep 1989, p.G12]

New Orleans looks as photogenic as ever but ultimately Johnny Handsome never quite leapfrogs over its fundamental cracks.

Barkin and Henriksen perform with relish, Whitaker and Freeman are pleasantly understated. Rourke tries harder than ever to minimise, nay obscure, his good looks, a process which merely serves to emphasise them.

This movie can spot the handsome face that lies beneath an ugly exterior, but it seems to get fooled by the rot that sometimes lurks beneath the sweet and the safe, the formula and the sure-fire.

Hill's action scenes here are surprisingly perfunctory, but his narrative exposition is superb--a model of minimalist restraint in lurid circumstances. Hill also maintains his ability to push his actors in interesting directions here, though Rourke's laconic performance fails to pay off.

Walter Hill directed this 1989 feature from a pulpy script by Ken Friedman (based on John Godey’s novel The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome), and its nasty, predictable plot and unpleasant characters aren’t made any more bearable by Hill’s customary smoke, sweat, funk, and neon.