North (1994) No stars A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: MONEY TRAIN now has company on my list of worst movies of all time.
I am having trouble putting my total contempt for NORTH into words. NORTH is easily one of the worst movies ever made by a major studio, and what's worse, it was made by a filmmaker I normally respect -- Rob Reiner, who gave us SPINAL TAP and THE PRINCESS BRIDE, two of my perennial favorites, among the many other excellent movies he's made. Now he gives us this... thing, which I suppose was intended to be a comedy in another, better world. In this one, it's a bag of garbage.
NORTH alleges to be the story of a young boy by the same name, who lives with his well-off but uncommunicative parents. The movie doesn't even bother to properly establish the lack of communication between child and parents: it dives right into a wretched scene at the dinner table where North (Elijah Wood) fakes a heart attack as a way of getting attention. Yuk, yuk, yuk. His father, a clothing inspector, makes the first of several dreadful cracks involving too-tight garments, none of which bear repeating here.
It gets much worse. After North decides that he has to divorce his parents (in itself the subject of the terrifically funny IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES, but worthless here), they go into comas and have to be wheeled into the courtroom on pallets. Yuk, yuk, yuk. North then heads off on a worldwide quest for better parents. Because of the publicity involved in his case, he gets lots of offers from various countries.
What happens next is a flabbergastingly shameless series of on-screen humiliations by dozens of actors, all of which play prospective parents from different locales. We get Dan Aykroyd as a Texan, Kathy Bates as an Eskimo, just to name two -- all of which are painted as such mindless caricatures that they don't even work as being *deliberately* hokey. It's a double insult: not only are the images of, say, the chainsmoking Frenchmen laughing like nitrous-oxide-crazed hyenas with the Eiffel Tower looming over them not funny, but they're not even interesting. One especially odious scene, which the filmmakers had the temerity to include in a trailer for the film, had North backing out of joining an Amish community, retreating into his airplane and laughing, "I think I left my butter churner in the overhead compartment." Yuk, yuk, yuk.
Oh, yeah. Wandering through this horrible mess is another character in various guises, played by Bruce Willis (who must have been real short on cash the week he agreed to be in this movie). Was there a clause in the contracts that required every actor to be humiliated beyond redemption?
I watched NORTH in appalled silence, waiting all the way through past the end credits for some sort of gag to be sprung on me. I kept waiting for the movie to turn itself inside-out, for some kind of meta-joke to start unspooling and make the whole wretched mess worthwhile. It never did. It really WAS that bad. With this and SPECIES II, I'm on a roll for the week.
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