While the New York Times' Lawrence Van Gelder calls it "sweet, sentimental" and "life-affirming," and Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer describes it as "a human-scale comedy that reaches across generations to tickle, connect and embrace," Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe and Mail says that "instead of achieving the heartwarming afterglow for which it strives, it leaves more of a prickly itch of discomfort," and Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News grumbles that it "drifts from goofy situation comedy to pop culture parody to a last-act load of sentiment that would sink a trash barge."

Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times takes a middle view. "In its first two-thirds," he writes, the movie "looks to be a winner. But it takes a disastrously wrong turn toward the end that all but destroys the good work that's come before."