Metacritic reviews

Next of Kin is a fast-paced, crisply directed, very entertaining genre movie. It has a lot more style and wit than most of the serious fare that's around. [25 Oct 1989, p.3E]

Neither a buddy-buddy action-comedy nor a pyrotechnical showcase of explosions and stunts, NEXT OF KIN--an intelligently made and moodily atmospheric action melodrama--provides solid, satisfying entertainment while demonstrating just how effective a fully realized genre film can be.

Swayze is persuasive in his role as an Appalachian boy sufficiently assimilated to big-city life to have married a classical violinist, and Baldwin makes a slick, icy villain. But it is Neeson as Briar Gates who steals this movie. Wily, saturnine, exuding a bitter familiarity with failure, he paints a portrait of a man whose actions are simple but whose feelings are complex. The part offers few lines to play with, but Neeson inhabits the role physically, the twang and the scruffiness never betraying his classical training at Dublin's vaunted Abbey Theatre. It's an enduringly poignant performance. [24 Oct 1989, p.3]

An appreciably better-than-average revenge drama.

Picture climaxes with an elaborate war in a Chicago cemetery between Baldwin’s mafioso and Neeson’s Kentucky kin, matching automatic weaponry with primitive (but reliable) crossbows, hatchets, snakes and knives.

It is a middling gun play that asks and answers the persistent question: Whither testosterone?

Automatic weapons versus shot-guns. Silly stuff, but it held my attention. [21 Oct 1989, p.C3]

After a fairly good, tense opening, it keeps rolling up one preposterous scene after another.

Together with Hamburger Hill, this illustrates that Irvin probably couldn't stage an action scene if you held a gun to his head. Even more turgid and unconvincing are the quieter 'dramatic' scenes, which serve only to arrest the plot's minimal momentum and prolong the agony.

We've known for years there is a hillbilly heaven because Tex Ritter used to sing of one. Now, thanks to Next of Kin, we know there's a hillbilly hell. [24 Oct 1989, p.4D]