NORM OF THE NORTH (Trevor Wall). 86 minutes. Opens Friday (January 15). See listing. Rating: N
I tried to be optimistic about Norm Of The North. Yeah, it’s opening in the dumping ground of mid-January, but maybe that’s just because a CG family adventure about a polar bear who comes to New York is a winter thing.
After about five minutes, my optimism was crushed – as the hopes of anyone who takes kids to this movie will be. Unless they’re hoping to be bored stupid for an hour and a half.
Rob Schneider voices Norm, an affable polar bear who feels like a misfit because he’s not a very good hunter. Oh, sure, he can catch seals, but then they open up about their feelings and he gets all guilty. This aspect of his personality is explored at length in the movie’s opening minutes and will never be spoken of again.
See, Norm’s real gift is that he can talk to humans. (So can his grandfather, though for some unknown reason no other bears have this ability.) And when nefarious real-estate developer Mr. Greene (Ken Jeong, doing a perfect Jeremy Piven) plants a model home in Norm’s backyard, our heroic bear makes his way to New York City to confront the guy and save his domain from human occupation.
How he does this is… well, it’s kind of dopey. He pretends to be an actor posing as a polar bear – explaining to Greene’s director of marketing, Vera (Heather Graham), that he’s so committed to his role he never takes the suit off – so he can star in a commercial promoting Greene’s Arctic homes.
It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but Norm makes friends with Vera’s brainy daughter (Maya Kay), and he’s accompanied everywhere by three adorable squeaky lemmings and… Shut up, this is a kid’s movie, why complain about lazy plotting or confusing character motivation?
Come to think of it, “Shut up, this is a kid’s movie” explains the general half-assed nature of Norm Of The North. The generic plot, the prefab character designs (those lemmings are basically the Minions with a layer of fur) and the just-good-enough quality of the animation all point to a certain lack of commitment on the part of the production team. This is the kind of movie that gets made because someone looks at a list of movies that turn a profit and thinks, “Well, it can’t be that hard.”
To be fair, it’s possible that director Trevor Wall and his associates at Splash Entertainment and Telegael went into this with the best of intentions and really do believe they’ve made a family film for the ages. But they haven’t. This is garbage.
