Peter Stack of the "San Francisco Chronicle" said that the dub "lends tackiness to an already inept comedy." A critic from the rival "San Francisco Examiner" newspaper stated that "the real trouble with this movie is that it isn't even funny. As directed by Herve Palud and written by Palud and Igor Aptekman, it's a feathery thing that does not show off Lhermitte's considerable allure and gifts as a comic. In this movie, he looks like a dope whose mouth is moving in a distinctly French manner, inexplicably spouting the words of some uninspired American goof." Janet Maslin of "The New York Times" further brutalized the production: "Whatever may have been funny - possibly nothing - about the popular French comedy [...] American audiences can watch it vanish before their eyes. This film has been dubbed into English so dreadfully that it becomes a discordant horror. Though the actors, including Thierry Lhermitte, Arielle Dombasle and Miou Miou, show faint visual signs of gentleness and civility, they now have now become crassly Americanized boors on the film's painful audio track." James Berardinelli opened his review with a paragraph which read, ""Little Indian, Big City", the American name given to Herve Palud's 1995 French fish-out-of-water comedy, "L'Indian dans la Ville", is easily one of the most tedious viewing experiences of 1996. I came as close to walking out of this movie as anything I have ever watched. No one, no matter how desperate they are for family entertainment, should be subjected to the indignity of sitting through this ninety-minute excuse for a motion picture."