Metacritic reviews

Benson is as annoyingly untalented as ever, and the film is definitely overlong, bordering on the dull.

Harry and Son is uneven, rambling into irrelevant subplots. But the strength of Newman's character holds the film together. [06 Mar 1984]

By the end, we can guess what Newman was up to, and how warm a story he meant to make. But nothing comes together until one of the characters is written out, and by that time, it is almost always too late. [02 Mar 1984, p.D1]

It would take a more expert director than Newman to pull the lumpy Harry & Son screenplay into shape, with its many trite scenes that can't decide whether they're funny or sad or in between. [19 Apr 1984, p.25]

Certainly, this is meant to be a bittersweet tale of the ties that bind the generations, of the love-hate relationship between a demanding Daddy and his amiable offspring. But nothing really develops, nothing ever connects. [02 Mar 1984]

A big-screen blowup of the sort of "I love you, Pop" television play that littered the small screen 25 years ago.

Fuzzily conceived and indecisively executed, Harry & Son represents a deeply disappointing return to the director's chair for Paul Newman. Cowritten and coproduced by the star as well, pic [suggested by the novel A Lost King by Raymond DeCapite] never makes up its mind who or what it wants to be about and, to compound the problem, never finds a proper style in which to convey the tragicomic events that transpire.

A curiously indigestible phenomenon, like being forced to eat five courses of avocado by an overbearing dinner-party host.

Paul Newman plays a crackerjack demolition man; unfortunately, before even half of this meandering and soggy film is over, Newman, as co-writer, co-producer, director and co-star, has flattened everything in sight, audience included. [29 Nov 1987, p.5]

The movie might have worked if it had been a satire of those awful made-for-TV Family Problem Movies.