Metacritic reviews

Take a healthy helping of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a dollop of The Bridge on the River Kwai, a dash of any Tarzan movie, a soupcon of Casablanca, a whiff of The Wizard of Oz and a stunt or two from a favorite Saturday serial, stir frenetically, and if you're lucky enough to have snappy dialogue by Ken Levine and David Isaacs, you may end up with as funny a movie as Volunteers.

Volunteers is for the most part so good-natured and eager to please, or at least to solicit laughs, that it may be forgiven many sins. Many of the jokes simply don't work, but in the style forged by Airplane!, Volunteers keeps them coming. Wait long enough, you'll laugh; wait again, you'll laugh again. [16 Aug 1985, p.D1]

A comedy boasting a gimmick worth a peek. For, into this remembrance of time past and youth altruistic, the script injects a heavy dose of up-to-the-minute pragmatism. [16 Aug 1985]

Hanks is excellent and has a way with funny lines that marks him as one of the better droll comic actors, if given the right material. Here, writers Ken Levine and David Isaacs have provided the actors with solid jokes.

A blasé Hanks redeems this string of sexist, racist, comic clichés with winning charm. It's funny.

It's a shame that this often cute script couldn't have better served, and been better served by, its actors.

Volunteers is a very broad and mostly flat comedy [from a story by Keith Critchlow] about hijinx in the Peace Corps, circa 1962. Toplined Tom Hanks gets in a few good zingers as an upperclass snob doing time in Thailand, but promising premise and opening shortly descend into unduly protracted tedium.

Volunteers is a collection of one-liners, mostly good, wrapped around an undeveloped story, generally dull. Despite its frequent glimmers of intelligence, it's an unsatisfactory comedy that yawns to a close.