Don't Mess with the Dragon was met with generally favorable reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 74, based on eight reviews.[1]
Lana Cooper of PopMatters wrote: "nearly everything about Don't Mess With the Dragon is as fluid and serpentine as the album's namesake".[5] Natalie Nichols of Los Angeles Times found that the band "makes its kitchen-sink musical fusion feel seamless in any given number... Still, "Dragon" can be dizzying in its sheer variety".[4] In her mixed review for AllMusic, Marisa Brown wrote: "it's not that any of these tracks are bad: Ozomatli is comprised of talented enough musicians, and have been doing it for long enough now, that they're able to pretty much successfully pull off anything they try, but these songs move so far from the sociopolitical salsa on which they created themselves that it's almost hard to recognize them as from the same band".[2] Writing for Spin, Mikael Wood stated: "[They] downplay the hip-hop boom-bap... in favor of busy pop jams that mirror the overstimulation of 21st-century life".[6]
