roger ebert gave the film 3 out of 4 stars and said: "i liked the movie for the quirky way it pursues humor through the drifts of greed, lust, booze, betrayal and spectacularly complicated ways to die. i liked it for charlie's essential kindness, as when he pauses during a getaway to help a friend who has run out of gas. and for the scene-stealing pathos of oliver platt's drunk, who like many drunks in the legal profession achieves a rhetorical grandiosity during the final approach to oblivion. and i liked especially the way roy, the man in the trunk, keeps on thinking positively, even after vic puts bullets through both ends of the trunk because he can't remember which end of the trunk roy's head is at. maybe it's in the middle."