Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 53% based on reviews from 106 critics. The site's consensus is: "Bamboozled is too heavy-handed in its satire and comes across as more messy and overwrought than biting."[3] On Metacritic it has a score of 54% based on reviews from 39 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[4]
Among those who gave positive reviews to the film were CNN correspondent Dennis Michael, who compared the film favorably to Mel Brooks' The Producers and praised Glover's performance in the lead role,[14] Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, who described the film as "savage, abrasive, audacious and confrontational" and "the work of a master provocateur",[15] and Stephen Holden of The New York Times, who described the film as "an almost oxymoronic entity, an important Hollywood movie."[16] It was not reviewed as favorably by the Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert, who gave the film 2 stars out of a possible 4, writing that the film was "perplexing," raising important issues but handling them poorly. "The film is a satirical attack on the way TV uses and misuses African-American images, but many viewers will leave the theater thinking Lee has misused them himself."[17]
By the time of its twentieth anniversary, Bamboozled had been reappraised as an underappreciated work of Lee's.[18] Writing for Rolling Stone, David Fear noted that "the really scary thing is that, 20 years on, Bamboozled feels incredibly contemporary. It doesn’t look so extreme after all...and when you consider the content of this film, that’s a very troubling thing.”[5]
Box office
The film grossed $2,463,650 at the box office on a $10 million budget.[1][19]
