Ten days after shooting began, I knew I was going to take the fall. Clint was playing formula Clint that always worked for Clint. I was playing Jack Lemmon in this strange film where people were getting blown away. I never read a review of the film because I knew I was going to get killed by the critics. The public wanted Boom Town or to see us in a contemporary film. They didn't want "Dirty Harry vs. the Wimp". It's regrettable the material wasn't there because Hollywood or maybe just Warner Bros. will never let Clint and I act together again. City Heat received lackluster reviews, and critics expressed their disappointment with the script and the pairing of the two star actors. On Rotten Tomatoes, 14 of the 18 reviewers cited gave the film a "rotten" review for a score of 22%. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 39 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Roger Ebert gave the film half a star, asking "How do travesties like this get made?" Gene Siskel gave the film zero stars, writing "Save for two moments when Eastwood does an amusing parody of his angry squint, City Heat is devoid of humor, excitement and amazingly, a comprehensible story." Janet Maslin was more positive, writing "overdressed and overplotted as it is, City Heat benefits greatly from the sardonic teamwork of Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds. Without them the film would be eminently forgettable, but their bantering gives it an enjoyable edge". According to Maslin: [T]he film...manages to be both cumbersome and slight. As he did in My Favorite Year and, to some extent, in Racing with the Moon, Richard Benjamin has settled on an evocative time period and a top-notch cast and more or less left things at that. City Heat devotes much more energy to props, sets and outfits than to the dramatic streamlining it so badly needed. The screenplay - which is part The Sting, part Sam Spade and part kitchen sink - is either a hopelessly convoluted genre piece or a much too subtle take-off on the same. Variety wrote of the star duo: 'This will hardly go down as one of the highlights in either of their careers, but there remains a certain pleasure just in seeing them square off together in a good-natured arm-wrestling match of charisma and star