Jesus Christ Superstar [the film] is intellectually as vacuous as the Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber rock opera it so faithfully follows,… and religiously as authentic as Sunday morning services at the White House….

[Almost everything in the film is played] for either laughs, irony or earnestness—not a shot in the film is corrupted by genuine emotion or sentiment. Jesus' character is so poorly drawn that we never understand either the appeal that he generates or the hostility he provokes….

The sheer triviality of this film is ultimately unsettling. Its makers failed to take the subject seriously, refused to honor their story, and never committed themselves to the fundamentally tragic nature of this most potent of Western myths.

Jon Landau, "Jesus Christ, Star of Stage, Screen & 'Hullaballoo'," in Rolling Stone (by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. © 1973; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Issue 140, August 2, 1973, p. 54.