Imagine, if you will, that it’s 1994 again.
Dopey family comedies are still a hot commodity, and Rob Reiner has just released a new film called “North.” The trailer makes it look like a cute movie, if a little cheesy. So you take your kids to go see it. You are then confronted with unrelenting horror and disgust.
“North” is truly a marvel. A movie so awful it caused Roger Ebert to say “I hated this movie. Hated, hated, hated this movie,” its legacy lives on as the worst stain on the legacy of Elijah Wood — yes, worse than “Spy Kids 3-D.”
Elijah Wood plays North, a 9-year-old boy who is an amazing super genius and good at everything, but is under-appreciated by his parents, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander. Bet you never thought you’d see Elaine and George from “Seinfeld” together again on screen — especially in something this awful.
North leaves his uncaring parents and hunts for better ones in a journey that leads him around the world of ethnic stereotypes, including, but not limited to, Kathy Bates in Native-face. The amount of ethnic stereotypes and laziness in concept is absurd, which is saddening.
This movie was made by the same man who directed “When Harry Met Sally,” one of the best comedies of all time, not five years earlier.
But in this film, beyond the aforementioned atrocity, the audience is forced to bear witness to an offensive African tribe, Dan Aykroyd attempting to sing like a cowboy, a French couple wearing berets and watching Jerry Lewis and a myriad of other things so offensive and mystifying it will make your head spin.
The cast of early ’90s superstars in this movie, most of whom are actually good actors, by and large are complete failures. The biggest crashing and burning comes by way of Bruce Willis, who plays the dual role of narrator and guardian angel for North. His performance is so wooden and so flat it would seem as though he had never stood in front of a camera before. He acts like Reiner grabbed him off the street, stuffed him in various costumes and screamed at him to act.
Willis is far and away not the only miserable flop on this movie’s cast list. Bless Wood’s heart — he wasn’t even 13-years-old when this movie was filmed, but he is atrocious. The only emotion he can convey is wide-eyed shock at the things that happen to him, particularly in one scene where he moves in with an average American family — white picket fence, barbecues, the whole nine yards. Incidentally, this average American family was Scarlett Johansson’s screen debut.
Honestly, even alongside all of the ethnic stereotypes, this family scene is the most frustrating in the entire movie. It seems like North is happy with his life, but he just kind of up and leaves. For no good reason, he goes away from the perfect family because the screenplay says so.
This movie is bewildering. How this massive amount of talent could come together to create such an awful product is beyond me. At least it managed to not entirely murder Frodo’s career.
