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What is difficult to understand is the film's utter lack of moral insight. One suspects that Stallone kept hoping to turn his labor leader into another Rocky, for, although his hero keeps trafficking with gangsters and tolerates much graft among his fellow unionists, he never gets upset about it because he 1) never takes anything for himself, and 2) insists that wretched means justify his ends: a strong union that enables its members finally to enjoy the pleasures of owning their very own campers, motorboats and other ecologically unsound objects. An actor, or writer, of parts might have made such a figure into a tragically flawed hero, someone like Willie Stark in All the King's Men. But there is no awareness of this dimension as we plod on with this clod Kovak through the long years until he gets his comeuppance, first at a Senate committee hearing, then at the wrong end of some shotguns.
Apparently neither Stallone nor anyone else who worked on this picture could bear to part with the lumpish likability that all tried so hard to establish at the beginning. In the end they sacrifice everything—insight, morality, a dramatic arc—to preserve intact their star's only known quality, best described as a sort of vulgar affability.
Norman Jewison, the director, seems unable to coax any interesting colors out of a supporting cast of usually excellent players. His action sequences, strikes, and strong-arm stuff in the early days of the union are congealed. When he is not having Cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs bathe the hard times in the golden glow of false nostalgia, his moviemaking is without dynamics. Vague and distant, it offers a succession of clichés instead of a concrete sense of the class or the lives the film is pretending to examine. About all that can be said for "F.I.S.T." is that it does for the employees what junk like The Betsy did for the employers: trash their history and deny them the dignity that is implicit in being treated thoughtfully. Even—maybe especially—Jimmy Hoffa deserves better than to be shredded and reprocessed as a character in an unanimated pop fable.
— Richard Schickel