Metacritic reviews

Some of the jokes are so raucously or goofily low-minded that you may laugh out of a kind of shocked weakness.

Aldrich is at his most crudely anarchic and macho celebrating the saintly community service and childish off-duty antics of Los Angeles's hard-nosed uniformed cops, starring Charles Durning, Perry King et al. [25 Feb 2007, p.6]

To my mind, this is one of Robert Aldrich’s worst films, but clearly not everyone agrees.

[Aldrich's] aiming so low in The Choirboys that he's even lost his technical competence; the movie's not just fetid, it's inept. [02 Jan 1978, p.59]

The film features a great cast and is adapted from a funny and moving book by Joseph Wambaugh, but the result is an abysmal, disjointed mess.

The book's humour was the ribald and understandable explosion of a safety valve; here it is merely an offensive display of stereotyping, sexism and patronising insincerity. A travestied misrepresentation and a notably complete failure.

When Robert Aldrich's filmmaking is good, it's very, very good; and when it's bad it's awful. This cheap-looking ultra-raunchy alleged comedy about policemen leaves no stone unturned in its exploitation of vulgarity.

A disjointed mish-M.A.S.H. of cliched comedy and misplaced observational wit.

The movie, which Mr. Aldrich directed from a screenplay by Christopher Knopf, is cheap and nasty without having any redeeming vulgarity and absolutely no conviction of truth.