At the heart of [Wertmuller's films] is formula—a very popular one, but a formula all the same. It may just be that when you've seen one Wertmuller, you've seen them all, or enough, or some permutation thereof….

Wertmuller's formula may raise baby Wertmullers, but such a diet can be monotonous, something the director herself must realize as she strives to one-up herself from punchline to pratfall. The ingredients—politics, buffoonery, hubris, nemesis, pathos, bathos, comedy, tragedy, melodrama, psychodrama, Giancarlo Giannini, misplaced convictions, mismotivated sex, displaced honor, dialogue permeated with the comparisons of religion and politics to the remotest banalities—are all dumped in varying quantities into the vat and cooked just long enough to produce the sweet smell of excess. Wertmuller's timing isn't off; there's simply too much of everything….

Wertmuller's formula requires the grand overview, a Message lurking obtrusively behind every turn of events, every churn of metaphor. This consciously-wielded Album of Great Ideas is what gives Wertmuller ballast with many critics who might otherwise be charmed but not awed. But what are these messages? and how much does she sacrifice of psychological continuity for comedy in order to get them across? In Swept Away, she chooses to ignore a profound psychological predicament between a man and a woman in favor of metaphor, by twisting and bending it to fit her political connotations, and thus co-opts a story rich with its own connotations and burning with possibilities far more devastating than Wertmuller is willing to follow through. (p. 49)

In Seven Beauties, it suits her purpose to have Pasqualino quiver before shooting his mortal enemy, while later, survival-obsessed, he shoots his best friend. The message of "survival first" is cynical enough, possibly true enough, but the character is a composite of conflicting reactions that doesn't quite add up to an interesting bundle of contradictions. Like nearly all of her messages, this one is pessimistic, indeed grim, delivered in rollicking nightmare scenes of concentration-camp compromises, with an irony born out of the scathing juxtapositions of bogus dignity and authentic betrayal. Only Wertmuller can force us to laugh at man's inhumanity to man—or to himself…. By making grotesquerie and overstatement her stock in trade, she bleeds the laughter from us at the cost of our sensibilities. Her considerable verbal wit and visual anomalies dare us to be outraged or outrageously amused. (pp. 49, 51)

Wertmuller may have put the situation back into comedy, but the effort of straining to extract significance from farce—and farce from significance—makes her films tiresome bundles of energy which could exhilarate only the most eager audience. Given a choice between the subtle and the profanely blatant, she always chooses the latter….

Her vehicle is a comic bathosphere bulging with ideas, some good, some bad, some screaming to be edited out—An overeager synthesizer, she's gotten something from everyone: characters and comic grotesques from Fellini, theatrical lighting from Visconti, satire from de Filippo, that concentration-camp blue from Cavani. But the overriding influence is her own past. A former puppeteer, she's made living, breathing puppets, and tried to fit them into the naturalistic world of cinema. Her commedia dell'arte figures appear as incongruous in the settings they stalk as the first astronauts on the moon; and the result is imaginative artifice disguising itself as art. (p. 51)