Thomas Elsaesser, author of "European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood", wrote that "No Mercy, No Future" was a "relative" failure in the commercial and critical aspects compared to "Germany, Pale Mother" and that the situation "may have led Sanders-Brahms in the direction of the European art cinema." London's "Time Out" has referred to the film's performances as faultless and it was screened at the 1982 Berlin International Film Festival and won the British Film Institute's Sutherland Trophy Award for 1981. Critic Michael Atkinson praised the film as a "classic, show-it-all acting coup that doesn’t wriggle free of your memory very easily."