The characters include the owner and his daughter (Damir Andrei and Catherine Fitch), their newly pregnant waitress (Caroline Dhavernas) being recruited to star in low budget porn videos, a young couple (Anna Friel and Kris Holden-Ried) with a criminal past struggling to recover their child from social services, and a middle class husband and wife (Peter Keleghan and Wendy Crewson) in a marriage that is disintegrating in near-record time - all led by a drunken motel caretaker (Craig Ferguson).

[7] Katherine Monk of CanWest News Service panned the film, writing that "good actors without a good script end up working incredibly hard just to make each moment worth watching, and thanks to Crewson's uptight body language, we can almost suspend disbelief long enough to think a middle-aged mom from an affluent suburb would sell herself at a fleabag motel to save her man and her marriage.

Then the voice of reason kicks in, and we remember that prostitution does not offer the lifestyle of Pretty Woman but a life dealing with sexually transmitted diseases, violent pimps and potentially homicidal johns.

Besides, every character in Walker's glossary of human experience feels like a cheesy cliche: the man without a job, the wife looking for her marriage, the poor pregnant girl, the grieving alcoholic.

"[2] Bernard Pérusse of the Montreal Gazette wrote that "if the characters were a bit more engaging and a shade less irritating, Niagara Motel would be firing on all cylinders.