ReelViews by James Berardinelli

Enjoy this movie for what it is - the kind of motion picture that can cause Champaign-like giddiness - and don't obsess over how true-to-life this work of fiction is.

Salon by Andrew O'Hehir

Let me come clean right now and tell you that I enjoyed The Intouchables quite a bit. If you're looking for a lightweight summer change of pace, with just a smidgen of Continental flair, here it is.

Observer by Rex Reed

It has warmth, humor and an understated sweetness that is not to be taken for granted.

USA Today by Claudia Puig

The Intouchables is an exuberantly charming French buddy comedy that proves an audience will suspend disbelief and follow an unlikely story as long as it's superbly crafted.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Stephen Cole

The Intouchables works as a crowd-pleaser not because it's true, but because it's a plausible enchantment.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Joe Williams

It's the kind of movie that inspires word-of-mouth recommendations by speaking the international language of culture clash.

Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern

The film fulfills its feel-good promise, as long as it's seen as the fairy tale it was meant to be.

Time by Richard Corliss

Not a great film but a warm one that pushes the viewer's emotional buttons so deftly it feels like a massage. My guess is that you will laugh and cry at all appropriate moments. Resistance is futile.

Arizona Republic by Bill Goodykoontz

There are plenty of reasons not to like The Intouchables, but Omar Sy's terrific performance blows right past them.

Boxoffice Magazine by Sara Maria Vizcarrondo

What it provides (instead of the thematically clever dialogue of typically subtle French comedy) is biting wit, poignancy and, forsaking some structural nuisances, the summer's best bromance.

Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum

The power dynamic may charm the French, but it's likely to push the cringe buttons of local moviegoers in Obama's post-"The Green Mile America." Apart from the wince-inducing moments, The Intouchables is often a pleasant buddy picture.

Movieline by Stephanie Zacharek

Actually, The Intouchables isn't bad - its merely shameless, but at least it's overtly so.

The A.V. Club by Sam Adams

Sy and Cluzet give their parts more conviction than they deserve, even when the former is forced to re-enact the falsetto-singing-in-the-bubblebath bit from Pretty Woman. But even their energy can't revive a corpse this dead.

The Hollywood Reporter

Corny, calculating and commercial...Their slickly executed culture-clash character piece is stuffed chock full of hard-knock life lessons that owe much more to the conventions of the screen than the tough realities of social deprivation and of the severely handicapped.

Time Out by Keith Uhlich

Cluzet and Sy nonetheless make for ingratiating foils; the extended opening sequence in which the duo outwits a pair of cops like a hell-raising Laurel and Hardy could be a stellar short comedy if it weren't married to the deadly self-serious shtick that follows.

Slant Magazine by Joseph Jon Lanthier

A cheeky dream-drama about the friendship between a rich, white quadriplegic and a penurious black job-seeker, the premise of The Intouchables alone nearly renders analysis redundant.

The New Yorker by David Denby

The plot becomes disastrously condescending: the black man, who's crude, sexy, and a great dancer, liberates the frozen white man. The handsome Omar Sy jumps all over the place, and he's blunt and grating. Francois Cluzet acts with his eyebrows, his nose, his forehead. It's an admirable performance, but the movie is an embarrassment. [28 May 2012, p.78]

Variety

Though never known for their subtlety, French co-helmers/scripters Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache have never delivered a film as offensive as "Untouchable," which flings about the kind of Uncle Tom racism one hopes has permanently exited American screens.