Norm of the North

NORM OF THE NORTH
Rated: PG (for mild rude humor and action)
Running time: 86 minutes
Released thru: Lionsgate
Theatrical Release Date: January 15, 2016

“Hey everybody, here’s a cute little animated film about a polar bear who can actually talk, and oh yeah, while we’re at it, let’s give him a message about climate change and the importance of enjoying nature’s beauty.”
Yeah, they’re taking the “Happy Feet” route. Except the problem is: that film was way more successful than “Norm of the North” will ever amount to. In fact, the problem is that it doesn’t even compare when the finished product looks like a rashly made direct to DVD product.
Norm (Rob Schneider) is a polar bear of the north pole who lives the life of luxury, except for one thing: he doesn’t know how to hunt. He does possess an inept ability to talk to humans. So when the human start invading his world, he travels to New York to try and speak to the human population when he realizes his home is in jeopardy. The wealthy entrepreneur Mr. Greene (Ken Jeong) has hatched a plan to build luxury houses in the Arctic (not a good idea), so Norm has to travel to New York in order to save his home from total takeover. He recruits three indestructible (really? lemmings to help as he tries to communicate with the people of New York about how important the Arctic home is to him and all the animals along the way. He does get some human help from Mr. Greene’s assistant Vera Brightly (Heather Graham) —- are you kidding me? that’s really her last name —- and her geographically smart daughter Olympia (Maya Kay), who really wants to attend a prestigious boarding school.
Schneider doesn’t belong in an animated film like this, nor should this film ever exist. It’s not the storyline. The problems are that the script is lazy, the animation is poor, the characters are badly drawn (however Councilwoman Kluebeck looks like she hails from every child’s worst nightmare) and all the voice-actors give the notion that they’re all probably phoning in when speaking their dialogue.
It pains me to end this by writing that before the film was even released into theaters, the distributor announced two sequels to this. Luckily, they’ll be going directly to video. How they got away with releasing this in theaters is beyond me. 



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