The Tall Guy - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Upon its September 1990 U.S. release, Entertainment Weekly gave it a "B-", describing it as "mildly charming and mostly too broad" and accusing it of overplaying "Dexter's dorkiness in the same way it overplays the big sex scene, the romantic montage, the breakup scene…" Caryn James of The New York Times wrote "even when its bright theatrical satire gives way to men dressed as nuns dancing in wimples and red sequined shorts, this modest comedy is always wickedly endearing, thanks to the off-kilter characters played by Mr. Goldblum and Emma Thompson as the unlikely woman of his dreams." Roger Ebert called the film a "sweet, whimsical and surprisingly intelligent comedy" whose "last third ...turns into a hilarious sendup of the modern musical" that "must be the funniest deliberately bad play in a movie since Mel Brooks' "Springtime for Hitler" in The Producers." The Deseret News called it a "most uneven romantic comedy," saying "If you're a Monty Python fan, lower your expectations a notch. We're more in Benny Hill territory here....The highlights here are easily the staged "Elephant!" sequences, with some very funny sendups of the gargantuan musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber."

In a 2003 mid-career retrospective about Richard Curtis, The Guardian described the film as being "patronised in one sense by critics while not patronised in the other by audiences.". It also identified several tropes from The Tall Guy that would be utilized in his subsequent romantic comedies, (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually):

• romantic lightning strikes that "Curtis seems to believe in as much as any figure in history apart from Cupid";
• the "willingness to sacrifice realism to a gag" (e.g. turning cartwheels in front of a giant moon to show that Dexter is in love);
• the "wacky but wise" flatmate;
• the use of eccentric obscenities (e.g. Ron's question "What in the name of Judas Iscariot's bumboy is going on?").