"Norm of the North" - Review

Twerking Bears. Twerking Bears Everywhere.

Why do I do this to myself?

The better question is why does this exist.

Oh wait. I remember. It costs nothing to make and clueless masses are going to give it money not realizing that they and their children are being taken advantage of.

Norm of the North is one of the laziest major studio releases I have ever seen. When I did research into how this production began, I learned with no surprise that this was originally going to be a straight to video release. It should have been a straight to garbage bin release.

This thing stars the deadly cinematic poison that is Rob Schneider who plays a goofy talking polar bear who lives in the arctic. There he plays with his stupid farting and pissing friends and practices his signature twerking skills with his polar bear iPod. (He practices them a lot by the way.) His days of relaxing twerkiness hit a road block with some human meanie buttheads show up and decide to begin to work on housing developments that are destroying the arctic habitats of these talking animals. So what it a twerking Rob Schneider polar bear to do? Go to New York City of course!

Think of Madagascar. Now think of Happy Feet. Now think of, to a much lesser extent, Disney's The Wild. Norm of the North ripped the plot away from these other children's movies an adapted it for the lowest common denominator who enjoys potty humor and bad puns over quality family entertainment.

We can not take this anymore. This is almost as bad of a Hollywood trend as the bad low budget horror movies we are always being spoon fed. People will always be there to give money to these things and this needs to stop. "But Bailey, it's just a kid's movie. It's harmless." Shut up. If you hate your child, if you want to metaphorically stomp on the development of your child's intelligence, take them to see this movie. Your child will have a more entertaining experience if you took the money that you would have used to pay for this cinematic trash and burned it outside. Then you could also teach your child a valuable lesson about our economy. Or about what happened to my money when I went to review this thing.

Your children deserve better than this. You can make a film that is flashy and silly and funny that is still witty and entertaining. Just last year, we had Minions, The Peanuts Movie, Inside Out, and The Good Dinosaur. All of these are good family films that are exciting and funny. They are also beautifully animated and feel like the creators gave a crap about making something they care about. This is not Norm of the North. Norm of the North is the opposite of this. Norm of the North is a turd.

I have seen bad and lazy kid's films. While those were not fun either, this one took noticeably more work. I sat through it though just so I can say that I did it. If you think I'm just being over-reactive or silly about "just a kid's movie", go talk to the couple of little kids who were begging their parents to leave so they could watch the DVD of Minions they just got for Christmas. One of them successfully was able to convince their mom to ditch the venture of following up on the money they just spent. The other kid fell asleep on the floor of the theater while the parent sat playing Candy Crush on her phone.

Zero effort was put into this movie. Zero effort will be made on my part to review any more of it.

Grade: F.

Norm of the North is now playing in theaters. And meth is also available somewhere out there. Doesn't mean you should go try to find it.