"Norm of the North" Review

Norm of the North is an animated comedy film that someone wrote and directed, collected a team of artists to create, and sold to the masses. It stars the voice of Rob Schneider as Norm, a polar bear who needs to become the greatest hunter in the Arctic so that he can ascend to the throne. Norm is the odd one out in his home, though, as he prefers to twerk. When he finds out that a cookie-cutter mustache-twirling greedy cartoon villain, the subtly named Mr. Green, wants to build condos in the incredibly marketable sub-zero-degree barren Arctic, he heads to the company's headquarters in New York City to try and dissuade him and also to twerk some more. This sets Norm and a trio (I think?) of indestructible pissing lemmings on an epic adventure in the Big Apple to try and get the company's approval rating as high as possible so that Norm can then go on television and expose the environmental repercussions of Mr. Green's proposals and turn the public against him to save the home that he couldn't wait to leave. Other characters are voiced by other actors. The movie ends eventually.

Jesus fucking Christ. Now, if my passive aggressive description didn't already make it obvious, this movie was absolutely atrocious. It's the worst movie I've seen in a theater in my entire life. I can't even describe the main plot without revealing how completely ridiculous, nonsensical, and offensively unentertaining it is. I feel disingenuous calling it an "animated comedy film". It barely qualifies as a film, in that it is a series of images presented in a sequence that tell something resembling a story, and I guess you could say it's animated, although the pre-Toy Story lifelessness and lack of detail make even that a dubious description (seriously, even shit like Beyond the Mind's Eye is more artistic and impressively animated than this, not to mention more entertaining). Designating this movie as a "comedy" is probably the most insulting, seeing as how the film isn't populated with jokes so much as pitiful attempts at kiddie-pandering toilet fodder.

This movie is a disgusting excuse for entertainment, and I'm not exaggerating any of the things I'm saying in this review to be funny or entertaining. I genuinely loathe everything about this movie, and it has no other redeeming qualities other than the fact that one day the whole of human creation will be destroyed by the inevitable heat death of the universe, and this pile of filth will be included in the cosmic rubble. The story not only makes little sense and is less absorbing than a block of concrete, but it's also horribly paced, populated with characters that are too boring and vapid to even count as cliches, and shamelessly trying to justify its existence by shoehorning in a pointless, simplistic environmentalist message that is somehow conveyed both passively and also with a complete lack of subtlety. In essence, it pushes a "green" message so hard, and yet at every opportunity reminds the audience that it's not what it actually cares about. That distinction goes to nonsensical one-liners, close-ups of Norm's giant hairy gyrating ass, and - I kid you not - more than a full minute devoted to the insultingly unfunny lemmings pissing.

This movie's characters are so bafflingly uninteresting that I hesitate to even call them characters. The most apt name for them is simply "computer models", because to suggest that these figures are anything other than a collection of data that presents an image is giving the film too much credit. They're not even interesting enough to be one-dimensional or to draw good comparison to other characters; these are the rare characters that are zero-dimensional. Norm's pointless quest is boring, tensionless, stupid, senseless, and peppered with so many failed attempts at jokes, not to mention all of this is presented with animation that looks like a cutscene from a Gamecube game, with choppy framerate, lifeless (and low-res) character models, and the most bland design possible for everything in the film.

That's my main problem with Norm of the North - unlike other historically bad and poorly animated kids' movies like Foodfight!, it's not even terrible in an interesting way. It's every flaw that can be found in a poorly made children's cartoon, with each of those flaws done in the most boring, uncreative way possible, and presented with off-putting, lifeless, dated-looking computer animation that all come together to tell us a recycled, uninspired story. Norm of the North is like garbage that doesn't even stink - it's just unappealing to look at, pointless, and should be ignored or disposed of.

Now, you may be wondering why I saw Norm of the North, considering there's pretty much nothing about this movie that could create any interest in it for me, from its charming 5% rating on Rotten Tomatoes to its landfill-fodder trailer that actually sells short how little this movie matters. The answer to your question is a new resolution I've made with myself that, during any week that I don't have a movie that I specifically want to see, I let my Twitter followers vote on which movie I get to see. This is in an effort to diversify the kinds of movies I see and review on this blog, considering I usually only see movies I have some desire to see. This film was the first result of this experiment, and I'm already disheartened.

Norm of the North is a waste of time, energy, money, and computing power. I hope Rob Schneider's personal life is fantastic to make up for the fact that his filmmaking career consists overwhelmingly of being a hapless pawn in the dumbing down of the human race and devaluing of cinema. I hate that this film was made, and I hate that I saw it, and I hate that kids saw it and liked it. I tried to fall asleep so many times during this movie, but the kids in the theater kept waking me up. Don't even watch this movie for a laugh, because you won't get one. This film is so bad that it's not even funny accidentally. It's just boring, ugly, unimaginative garbage. Fuck everyone involved in its production.

Grade: F-