Critics reviews

Dave Kehr, who reviewed "The Big Chill" in Chicago Reader, called it "a slickly engineered complacency machine." The word "machine" is apt... The ensemble had a sitcom slickness.

Kasdan relies primarily on the music to fill the void, which makes some sequences, like a touch football game set to "Gimme Some Lovin'," come across as merely cute, especially compared to Sayles' more caustic reunion. Or maybe "cozy" is the right word, in keeping with the soundtrack's parade of hits and the warm bubble of nostalgia they create. Can "MMMBop" serve that function today?

Unfortunately, Kasdan and Benedek are beholden to nostalgia, churning out characters whose dulled sense of both self and irony is surpassed only by the pandering and indulgent soundtrack, which functions like a mixtape of the most fetishized order. Kasdan attempts to guise this decidedly commercial choice through the proclivities of his characters, but the wager is wafer thin.

The Big Chill is a self-satisfied slap on the ass, one where the filmmakers exploit their audiences' nostalgia for "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" as if it were a countercultural samizdat rather than one of the most famous songs of all time... However, if you're looking for yet another child of the '80s to decry The Big Chill's smug self-congratulation, look elsewhere. For all its flaws, the film is terrifically acted, intermittently beautiful-looking, and never boring.

There is no place for depth or nuance in this slickly engineered complacency machine, which roars along at a single tone and pace, neatly dispelling every troubling intimation with a Mary Tyler Moore one-liner and solving all its conflicts with tricks of rhetoric. The ensemble cast looks impressive, but all of its members have been better elsewhere...

In some measure, The Big Chill is Kasdan's first ambitious screenplay and, though coauthored with Barbara Benedek, is perhaps the fulfillment of the flame that carried him from being an ad copywriter in Detroit through the scripts of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Continental Divide, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, where he was a waiter in somebody else's café...