Roger Ebert wrote: ""Criminal Law" is a textbook example of a movie going wrong before our very eyes, because of the curious failure of the filmmakers to realize that you can toy with an audience only so long before the audience grows resentful... It's a shame such good performances were lost by the runaway use of gimmicks." "Variety" commended the work of Oldman and Bacon, but criticized the story's "ill-defined pretensions as an essay on the American legal system and a herky-jerky continuity that's fatiguing instead of tingling". Kevin Thomas felt that "Criminal Law" "proceeds from one weakness to another", but described Oldman as "electrifying".