To me, this movie is perfection.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Tick off another Richard Pryor comedy vehicle, which actually wasn't too bad even though it had him playing the same sort of comic role and the humour could be put off by its heavy-handed running themes. Pryor stars as an ex-con who poses as a psycho to get out of a jail sentence, so the judge sends him to a hospital where he would find himself posing as an emergency room doctor one night in his attempt to escape during a cyclone because the doctors don't believe him to be insane. This hospital comedy is zany, crude and very often unhinged, as Pryor plays it neurotic with a certain deadpan quality and across him was the lovely Rachel Ticotin. The support cast surrounding him are quite good in their deliveries. Ruben Blades, Sylvia Miles, Joe Mantegna, Bob Dishy, Garrett Morris, Randel "Tex" Cobb, Bob Saget and John Polito. The hodge podge story throws around many ideas and gags in a downright chaotic manner, from mistaken identity to offbeat medical techniques and displaying confidence in those around you to act upon your own judgement leading the way. "Critical Condition" is far from a lethal injection, as in the end it all comes together in an amusing haphazard way led by the likable comedian Pryor. "He doesn't need a second opinion".

As much as I love Richard Pryor, this movie is well, awful. I haven't seen this movie in years and recently watched it on one of the paid movie services. I originally saw it when it was released in the theaters because I have always followed Richard Pryor's career. The concept of the movie just doesn't fly and having Randall "Tex" Cobb as a main character didn't help any. Honestly, I won't invest another hour and a half to ever watching this again. There are also some other "B" actors such as Joe Mantegna and Bob Saget but they are not very good either in this movie. Sorry Richard, you are a great performer but this movie stinks.

Basically a vehicle for Pryor, this is a rough and somewhat ugly movie, disfigured in part by a surfeit of swearing in a film that doesn't need it and a bunch of vaguely unsympathetic characters. The central plot – a framed man who has claimed insanity has to pretend to be a doctor during a blackout at a hospital – is intriguing if somewhat convoluted. As a twist on the fish-out-of-water story, it has much potential, in the same way that Woody Allen's "Hollywood Ending" has much potential in its premise of a suddenly-blind director having to go through the entire shoot without letting anyone know he is blind. Just as with that movie, "Critical Condition" mainly fails to capitalize on its potential, and the film is oddly slow-moving and genuine laughs are hard to come by.Pryor does well to work with the underdeveloped material, and Rachel Ticotin adds solid support in the role of the hospital administrator. There is a nice addition of a subplot involving crooks roaming the hospital to add to the tension of the staff and patients trying to survive the power outage, and the film as a whole is at least watchable, but not very memorable. It does not have widespread appeal as a comedy/thriller and should probably be best recommended for Pryor fans only.

This rather mediocre comedy from 1987 was produced at the height of Richard Pryor's (somewhat unfortunate) lapse into brain dead motion picture comedies. However, like most of his films, Pryor made standard, silly concepts -- in this case, a man mistaken for a doctor forced into pretending to be on -- amusing.Pryor plays a framed jewel thief who pleads insanity and is sent to a hospital for mental check-ups. However, once there is is mistaken for an actual doctor, and continues the charade to avoid being charged with a crime he didn't commit, etc.It's got a lot of obvious jokes that get old in five minutes - this would be an effective "SNL" skit, NOT a full-length movie. The problem with standard concepts such as these is mainly that once you've accomplished your goal -- ha ha a man pretending to be a doctor who doesn't know anything about medical practice, that's hilarious! -- there's nowhere left to go. So they add boring and uninteresting subplots, typically romances which end with the mistaken man confessing he isn't who the woman who loves him thought he was, they break up, and then they get back together again for a happy ending in which she realizes that she really loves him for who he is, not for what he is.That said, Pryor makes this entertaining - more so than it should be.