Most critics take Shattered as a competent Hitchcock-flavoured thriller that works in spite of a far-fetched plot. The praise clusters on Petersen’s handling of the twists and red herrings, and on the final reveal, which several reviews consider the film’s strongest card. The warmest notices call it sleek, amusing and entertaining; the cooler ones still allow that it grips, and that its clues are planted with some care.
The reservations gather around plausibility and the sheer number of bluffs. Radio Times finds the double-bluffing exhausting, even while admiring the ending that causes it. The one outright dissent comes from Variety, which judges the film emotionally uninvolving and its implausibilities fatal to the suspense, reserving its approval for Bob Hoskins’s lively private detective. The spread is wide for so few reviews, running from a strong recommendation down to a dismissal, and two of the seven cannot be read closely enough to place with confidence.