Metacritic reviews

The movie is pure hound, but you'll want to catch Short's every pixilated move. He almost made me wish that the picture would never end.

This is Short's picture, and though he can do no wrong in it, he is not in a position to carry the whole thing. His fans will dutifully trek to it, laughing at his skill and wondering when Hollywood will finally do him justice. It's a hell of a good question.

Martin Short can do anything, it seems, except find the right movies to star in.

A misfire.

Pure Luck is a bad movie, all right - with leaden timing, a disorganized screenplay, and stretches where nothing much of interest seems to be happening.

This take, like so many Hollywood takes on French comic originals, is diligent, but, with too few exceptions, irredeemably soggy. [09 Aug 1991, p.42]

Pure Luck manages to deliver only four decent laughs in its entire 105-minute time.

Danny Glover is an adequate straight man, as both Lethal Weapon pictures demonstrate, and Martin Short can certainly be funny. But they don't really play as a team; you get the feeling that their sheer physical disparity--tall, dark-skinned Glover and tiny, red-haired Short--struck someone as so inherently funny that it didn't matter that the two of them don't ignite comic sparks.

Predictably impersonal and uninspired.

Just about unwatchable — a numbingly repetitive farce in which the cursed Short trips, walks into walls, trips, spills an entire saltshaker onto his breakfast, trips, sets people on fire, trips…