Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote "It's not every day you get to see a performance as bad as Lorraine Bracco's in Medicine Man" and Connery "doesn’t do much he hasn't done before". Gleiberman praised some moments where the film "becomes the dazzling true-life jungle saga it clearly wants to be" but is critical of the plot which he says is "built around some very tired devices" and "The race-against-the-clock structure is a flimsy conceit". He gave it a grade C+.