Moviedom is littered with the wreckage of ill-conceived small-to-big-screen adaptations, but RENO 911!: MIAMI is not the disaster it could've been. Fans of the TV show need not shudder. You will not see sacrilege. You will see the four-season series boiled down to its essence and molded into an 84-minute CliffsNotes version for theatrical consumption. (...) RENO 911!: MIAMI will suffice for fans who are hungry for new material. For those who've never seen the show but wouldn't mind a little transplanted Nevadan vulgarity, sample the movie and consider catching the series on DVD, where the perp-chasing, trigger-happy tomfoolery has over 1,000 minutes to blare its sirens.

• http://www.washingtonpost.com

On television, where it’s broken into small chunks and interrupted by blocks of commercials, RENO 911! can make for a diverting pastime. When blown up for the movies, however, the same jokes don’t carry anywhere near the same zing. The commercials serve an important rhythmic function, since they impose time constraints on how long each comic bit lasts: funny bit, commercial, funny bit, commercial. The self-consciously threadbare story lines (...) work well with the piecemeal comedy. Yet what feels amusingly anarchic on the small screen feels underdeveloped and disjointed on the big screen, perhaps because instead of commercials gluing the jokes together there’s dead air. RENO 911!: MIAMI runs 84 minutes, or about as long as four back-to-back episodes without the ads. And indeed 10 of those minutes seem gobbled up by the bloated closing credits, which include comic odds and ends along with the usual data. (...) RENO 911!: MIAMI provokes some chuckles and minor hoots, but it’s a disappointingly sloppy affair that feels as if it had been thrown together with little more than spit and a belief in the enduring good will of the show’s fans, some of whom might actually be hoping for a movie.

• http://www.nytimes.com

There are enough pleasantly irreverent moments here that would cut together for a swell episode of the heavily improvised series, (...) but as a feature-length proposition, there are so many occasions where it just sits there that the film could issue itself a ticket for loitering. (...) The plot doesn't really thicken any more than that, with a semblance of a script by director Robert Ben Garant (...) along with Lennon and Kerri Kenney-Silver (...) that's flimsier than Dangle's hot pants. That deliberately loose structure might serve the sketch performers well on the small screen - the writing trio previously comprised the State, a comedy troupe that had its own series on MTV - but the demands of the big screen call for something a little more substantial than "insert improvised dialogue here."

• http://www.hollywoodreporter.com