[Spike Lee] knows the show belongs to his comedians, so he aids and abets from the shadows like the best of accomplices. The result is the Stop Making Sense of stand-up comedy movies

Their comic material is all cut from much the same cloth and lacks variety: their viewpoint is middle-aged; their "attitude" is strenuously confrontational.

There are some good gags and routines here, but loads of them have been done with far more invention and wit by Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy.

An hour of it would probably have been enough.