The major film critics were similarly dubious, neither praising it nor condemning it entirely when it opened on December 12, 1980. Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, said that Popeye was “a thoroughly charming, immensely appealing mess of a movie, often high-spirited and witty, occasionally pretentious and flat, sometimes robustly funny and frequently unintelligible. It is, in short, a very mixed bag.” Gene Siskel, in the Chicago Tribune, called the film “an apparent big-budget bomb in a year full of overproduced stinkeroos,” but he did hail Robin for “a performance that only a major artist
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