Metacritic reviews

Good Morning, Vietnam works as straight comedy and as a Vietnam-era MASH, and even the movie’s love story has its own bittersweet integrity.

One of Levinson's best films, and one of Hollywood's best films on the whole Vietnam subject.

Good Morning, Vietnam, directed by Barry Levinson (Diner, Tin Men) succeeds in doing something that's very rare in movies, being about a character who really is as funny as he's supposed to be to most of the people sharing the fiction with him. It's also a breakthrough for Mr. Williams, who, for the first time in movies, gets a chance to exercise his restless, full-frontal comic intelligence.

From the start, the film bowls you over with excitement and for those who can latch on, it’s a nonstop ride.

Good Morning, Vietnam stumbles whenever Williams isn't behind the mike, placing him in melodramatic, hackneyed situations that become increasingly predictable and preposterous, and director Barry Levinson's seemingly endless reaction shots of listeners grooving to the DJ's antics become irritating. Levinson manages, however, to be one of the few filmmakers to show the Vietnamese as complex, cultured people, rather than as helpless victims or the faceless enemy.

Offering only hackneyed insights into the war, the film makes for stodgy drama. But Williams' manic monologues behind the mike are worth anybody's money.

The film itself--a dramatic comedy based on the 1965 Saigon gig of irreverent Armed Forces disc jockey Adrian Cronauer--is good-hearted but shallow. It's a piece of programmed irreverence, photogenic torpor, prefab compassion. But Williams, as Cronauer, is so blazingly brilliant that he detonates the center, exploding it in berserk blasts of electronic-age surreality.

Williams is at his best in Good Morning, Vietnam when he’s pitched between manic and earnest: when he’s reacting to his castmates, who actually are funny. Too much of Good Morning, Vietnam, though, is self-congratulatory without giving any real reason for the applause.

What you end up with in Good Morning, Vietnam is a peculiar hybrid -- a Robin Williams concert movie welded clumsily onto the plot from an old Danny Kaye picture. And neither half works.

The way the story line has been directed it's a clumsier versions of the plots of 50s musicals.