Spaceballs has the happy air of a comic enterprise that knows it's going right. It just keeps spritzing the gags at us, Borscht Belt-style, confidently and rightly sensing that if we don't laugh at this one, we'll laugh at the next. And so we do.

| Apr 12, 2024

If it isn't likely to generate what Mr. Brooks himself refers to as 'Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money, neither is it anything less than gentle, harmless satire that occasionally has real bite.

| Apr 12, 2024

It probably will do fairly well with kids and younger adolescents, who haven't heard the bad puns and seen the sight gags a thousand times before.

| Apr 12, 2024

Parts of it work wonderfully, but whole stretches flounder.

| Original Score: 4/10 | Apr 12, 2024

One gropes in vain to find substantial pleasures in Spaceballs. The film is basically an empty wasteful retread of the self-conscious approach that seemed so fresh 13 years ago in Blazing Saddles.

| Original Score: 2/10 | Apr 12, 2024

No one is that interested in Star Wars anymore. So watching Spaceballs is like picking up an old copy of Mad magazine and being puzzled about that Jack Palance parody you found so funny years ago.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Apr 12, 2024

No matter how dumb it gets, though, Spaceballs goes by so smoothly and briskly that it's hard for a viewer to get cranky. And if parents don't object to a sprinkling of off-color words, the film's silliness could make it a hit with kids.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 12, 2024

Brooks' own timing as a director doesn't seem up to its usual snuff. Light-years stretch out between the set-up of a gag and its payoff, and for a director who has always depended on the quantity of his jokes rather than the quality, the gap is fatal.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Apr 12, 2024

Alas, this parody, though intermittently funny and reaching a full head of steam in its last couple of reels, seems tired and unimaginative compared with Brooks's best work.

| Apr 12, 2024

Though Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs is burlesquing a Star Wars genre which is already half-way to being a self-parody, he brings off some hilarious sight-and-sound gags at the expense of a “once upon a time-warp” story.

| Apr 12, 2024

It is a quite ridiculous and hugely enjoyable spoof.

| Apr 12, 2024

One hates to think of Brooks being out of touch, but good grief... whatever would possess him to start spoofing Star Wars at this late date?

| Apr 12, 2024

The puns are so awful that you don't want to groan so much as whimper, appalled at how much they make you laugh... The secret of its success is that Brooks has found a way of mixing slightly sophisticated wit and childishly obvious comedy.

| Apr 12, 2024

Nobody laughs louder at his own jokes than Mel Brooks. That's why his films are so often uneven -- he has no sense of proportion.... That's also what makes him occasionally one of the funniest men alive, because he'll try anything to make us laugh.

| Apr 11, 2024

Most of Spaceballs plays at ludicrous speed, and even the parts that drag are funnier than an entire season’s worth of Saturday Night Live.

| Apr 11, 2024

For the too-few minutes Yogurt is on screen, Spaceballs is a savagely funny complaint about the kind of movie more memorable for its spinoff products than for itself. The remainder of the airheaded Spaceballs just has no bounce.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 11, 2024

One small step for mankind, one giant step for burlesque.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 11, 2024

Some of the gags in Spaceballs are screamingly funny. Some are mildly amusing. Others seem forced, pokey or deliberately, of course flatulent.

| Apr 11, 2024

If Spaceballs lurches erratically from gut laugh to groaner, perhaps it’s because the Star Wars movies aren’t the most fertile soil for a feature-length sendup... [Still,] when Spaceballs connects, you remember why Brooks was once comedy’s MVP.

| Apr 4, 2024

The spirit of desecration rules Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs. Buoyant, unsentimental low comedy, this manic Star Wars parody is continually vulgar without ever seeming smarmy.

| Apr 3, 2024