How sweet it is to find a movie in which the hero, having lusted after purely carnal pleasures for much of its length, finally falls in love with a woman's mind. That there is nobody attached to it, that it is, in fact, a brain Kept alive in a bottle by a half-mad scientist, might strike some people as a little funny. It will strike vaster numbers of them as very funny—especially after Steve Martin pastes plastic lips on the bottle so he can kiss his beloved….
[The Man with Two Brains] is the most assured and hilarious of the three Martin-Carl Reiner collaborations. There is something classically American about its monomaniacal pursuit of a gag every five seconds, characterization and redeeming social value be damned. The movie is rather like a Henny Youngman monologue combined with a National Lampoon spread. And it offers reassuring proof that the spirit of arrested adolescence lives on, at least for one more summer.
Richard Schickel, "Head Trip," in Time, Vol. 121, No. 25, June 20, 1983, p. B3.
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