Metacritic reviews

My Blue Heaven: a funny, sometimes insightful look at what life might be like when a hardened criminal is plunked down in middle-class suburbia. [20 Aug 1990, p.23]

It is apparent that through most of My Blue Heaven, Steve Martin's talent is tossed away on this sketchy outline of a howlingly funny idea.

Steve Martin is amusing as a gangster transplanted to the suburbs, but the movie is a mess, and too jammed with ethnic stereotypes for "just kidding" to be an excuse. [5 Oct 1990, p.12]

My Blue Heaven is weightless and unwieldy. It's a confused carnival of silly subplots and characters who never manage to form an ensemble. [17 Aug 1990, p.37]

What My Blue Heaven has going for it: one funny premise and two earthly delights, in the comic persons of Steve Martin and Rick Moranis. What My Blue Heaven does not have going for it: anything remotely resembling a cohesive script. [22 Aug 1990, p.C4]

Although about as authentic as Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, Martin at least gets to dress funny. Joan Cusack's D.A. looks dowdy and is misused. Carol Kane's grocery-store siren looks slutty and is underused. And as a cop, Melanie Mayron should slap cuffs on her hairdresser. [20 Aug 1990, p.4D]

Someone should have told Steve Martin that, prodigiously talented though he is, his over-the-top caricature of a displaced mobster could not sustain an entire movie, particularly one as scattershot as My Blue Heaven. [20 Aug 1990, p.2]

When director Herbert Ross is away from his dance numbers, he lets the pace sag frightfully. A lot of good talent on both sides of the camera goes down with this PG-13-rated ship. [20 Aug 1990, p.6]

My Blue Heaven is interesting as an example of how talented or at least experienced people can spend a great deal of time, money and effort on a movie that fails consistently, in almost every single scene. [30 Aug 1990]

Talk about off-casting: brittle-romantic Nora Ephron writing a high-concept comedy about a Mafioso's troubles when the Federal Witness Security Program plunks him down in white-bread suburbia; humorless Herbert Ross directing it; Steve Martin playing the gangster. Talk about miscalculation. [3 Sept 1990, p.72]