David Pearce’s review published on Letterboxd:
"Now see what you've done with your filthy eastern ways!"
I feel the Beatles themselves are their greatest downfall in this film. None of them are incredible actors, nor do any of them seem interested in acting, so as a result the only interesting element of this film is shoved to the background in favour of a very flimsy and racially "uncomfortable" story involving human sacrifice and Eastern religion.
It's obvious that after A Hard Day's Night Richard Lester quickly discovered, as did everyone else, that Ringo is the only mildly talented actor of the bunch. While he can act to a certain degree, it doesn't make up for his awful comedic timing and charisma on screen. This means that Ringo was simultaneously shoved to the front of the film, being the one character that is actually involved in the Eastern plot, yet somehow dragged to the back in favour of showing off the other members of the band. I got this impression that the film would have been a lot more focused if it just didn't feature the other three Beatles, but more importantly I got this impression that the other three didn't really want to be there. George Harrison was just barely present with John and Paul constantly being pushed in front of him, despite them both being rather awkward on screen. Paul and John were given all of the cute one-liners and didn't contribute much else to the film, which is a lot more than the nothing George brought. Ultimately the story felt extremely segmented, each change in location feeling like a completely different story, which only added to how much this film felt like a compilation of a holiday album. The worst offender of this is during the "Another Girl" music video, which featured non-introduced characters, the Beatles dressed in casual clothing and there were plentiful of locations that bare no relevance later on. All of the music videos were by far the most entertaining sequences of the film, but none of them bared any relevance to the plot. Despite its title and quirky cover, the "Help!" album was just another collection of love songs. This means that cutting between this James Bond parody film we had these romantic songs, despite the film featuring no kind of romantic plot line.
People are way too forgiving of this film just because it stars the members of a popular band. This movie was only produced to capitalize on the ever-growing success of everything this boy-band touched and it really shows in the worst way. At the most I would argue that it's interesting to see some of the bands first interactions with South Asian culture, an area that seemed to greatly influence their music around the middle of their career during the release of this film, but beyond this I feel this film is completely pointless.