By most every account, Richard Brooks's penultimate project, Wrong is Right (1982), is not a very good movie. Brooks's biographer, Douglass K. Daniel, determines that “by nearly every measure, Wrong is Right should have ended Richard's career.” Daniel notes that even Brooks refers to the film as “the biggest disaster of his career,” although he does refuse to dismiss it entirely. Brooks suggests the film has some merit for its prophetic ability. In very short order, the very dangers Wrong is Right shows developing had occurred in lived reality, including suicide bombers throwing themselves into crowds and significant landmarks. Brooks suggests that such confirmation confirms that his film was too honest to gain the audience it deserved, even if the film was woefully underfunded, as he was also fond of saying.

Critics have been less forgiving. Vincent Canby refers to the film as a “wholehearted mess.” Canby lodges two primary complaints. The film fails to offer a clear point of entry since the main character, Patrick Hale (Sean Connery), is something of an intertextual mess caught between Edward R. Murrow and James Bond. Even more confusing for Canby is the site of action for the film. Canby writes that the movie moves across the globe at such a pace that “the audience often can't be sure where things are taking place.” Opinion of the film hardly changes over the two-plus decades that pass between its theatrical release and its release on DVD. Stuart Galbraith's 2004 reassessment of the movie refers to Wrong is Right as a cinematic “bomb.” For Galbraith, the movie spins in the “air of a [poorly produced] TV movie [with too much] stock footage [and] lousy (even for 1982) special effects.” Galbraith reserves his sharpest criticism for the film's agonizing humor. Beyond the one-liners that often fall flat, Galbraith also protests Brooks's decision to pretend to film Wrong is Right on location in “Hagreb,” a made-up country in North Africa. One might rightly attribute this choice to Brooks's source-text for his script, Charles McCarry's The Better Angels, which also occurs in “Hagreb.” But Galbraith is right to imply that describing a made-up location in a novel and filming a movie in a made-up location has a different effect. The image on the movie screen is often thought to have some basis in the actual world that a novel's setting need not have.