Metacritic reviews

Michael Cimino's Desperate Hours is an attempt to take a 1950s crime classic and remake it by turning up the heat, but Cimino has set the heat too high, and the result is an overwrought melodrama with dialogue even a True Detective editor would question.

Rourke is, in fact, exceedingly creepy. There's an unpredictable, resonant menace in his eccentricity. But Cimino can't connect the movie's thriller elements to its themes. We end up spending way too much time indoors while this thug waves a gun at these poor innocents.

This remake of The Desperate Hours, the 1955 Humphrey Bogart criminal-on-the-lam suspenser, is crisp and atmospheric - and doggedly ordinary. [05 Oct 1990, p.46p]

However poorly the material has aged, Cimino has not come close to tapping its potential. [05 Oct 1990, p.D]

With the prospect of more films like it in his future, Rourke’s decision to walk away from Hollywood while his star was still on the ascendant makes a lot more sense.

Despite the usually dependable cast, this is a slow and ever-so-slightly dull affair. Try Bogart's 1955 original instead.

Desperate Hours is a coldly mechanical and uninvolving remake of the 1955 Bogart pic The Desperate Hours, with Mickey Rourke as the hood terrorizing a suburban family.

Not desperate, but disappointingly ordinary.

What has been lost is more than Bogart's gritty presence.

The most desperate thing about Desperate Hours is Michael Cimino’s attempt to direct it coherently. In Cimino’s paws, the story of a merciless crook (Mickey Rourke) terrorizing a suburban family descends into lurid gibberish.