Metacritic reviews

People may go to see Eddie Murphy once, twice, three or even six times in disposable movies like Harlem Nights, but if he wants to realize his potential he needs to work with a better writer and director than himself.

The best thing about the film is the way it allows Richard Pryor to rise above the demeaning buffoon roles he's been playing for the last few years and finally play a character with dignity and style. [17 Nov 1989, p.89]

I don't mind that Nights is a potty-mouth benchmark; crude verbiage is appropriate to the leads, as well as the film's subject matter. This is, however, an amazingly mean two hours. Even the funniest gag involves Murphy's fatal shooting of three men. [17 Nov 1989, p.6D]

In Harlem Nights, Eddie Murphy continues his one-man war against the female gender. Those women he doesn't kill outright are punched, maimed and slugged with garbage cans. But apparently they deserve it-there isn't a single female character in the film who isn't a prostitute. [17 Nov 1989, p.A]

Harlem Nights is not the disaster some people might have been expecting. Mr. Murphy has appeared in far worse films written and directed by people much more experienced.

This blatantly excessive directorial debut for Eddie Murphy is overdone, too rarely funny and, worst of all, boring.

Unfortunately, entertainer-for-life Murphy, directing for the first time, seems to have spent his energies on topping the bill rather than on the bill itself.

Eddie Murphy's directorial work is amateurish at best. And as a performer he looks as if he is in agony, as if his mother made him stand in front of the camera for punishment.

The movie is full of phallic gags about little-bitty guns and crude jokes at physical or emotional infirmities. [17 Nov 1989, p.6]

As it stands, Murphy has put his idols and friends in front of a camera, given them a watered down version of The Sting and hoped they'd make the best of it. They don't. [23 Nov 1989, p.C12]