"North" Review: Rob Reiner's Funeral Is A Bleak Affair

Simply put, Roger Ebert was right.

April 8, 2025

On July 22, 1994, the Chicago Tribune published Roger Ebert’s review of Rob Reiner’s adventure comedy, North. Generally civilized but assertive in his criticism, Ebert abandoned his signature style in favor of outright condemnation, delivering the most infamous film review of all time:

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“I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.”

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So, 31 years after Ebert ended Reiner’s career, it felt prudent to revisit a critical and commercial failure so colossal that it vanished from the public consciousness entirely, much like how the final season of Game of Thrones eviscerated the show’s seemingly invulnerable cultural relevance.

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Was Ebert too harsh in his assessment? Was Reiner’s career meltdown justified, or did everyone hop aboard a bandwagon and unjustly rake over the coals a perfectly charming kids' movie that deserved better than it got?

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Well, let it be said loud and true:

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I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie.

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Why? For the same reason I hate most people: it sucks and is worthless.

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It begins with a precocious 6th-grade boy named North, so named for an unspecified reason, who the entire town believes is the second coming of Christ. He is the excuse parents make for repeatedly criticizing their children for not being unimpeachable, even though one of North’s supposed talents - musical theater - gets established with a horrendously off-key performance of “If I Were A Rich Man.”

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Undervalued by his awful parents, whose dinnertime spats define North’s life, he forsakes them and seeks out new parents. When a judge grants his request, with the stipulation that he finds new parents by Labor Day, North sets out on an international adventure to find a new home.

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Who and what does he encounter on this adventure?

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1. Jerry Lewis obsessives
2. Congolese breasts
3. Oklahomans with a feeding fetish
4. Alaskan murderers
5. Hawaiian child pornographers

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We begin with the feeder Oklahomans, played bizarrely by Reba McEntire and Day Aykroyd. Heartbroken over the loss of their beloved son Buck, they seek to make North into the perfect recreation. As Buck was a ravenous glutton, the only way to do that is to overload North with as much knock-off KFC as possible. When North asks why they’ve put a Mount Vesuvius’ worth of food on his plate, they fess up to using him to replace their dead kid, but with a song.
In one scene, we have a joke about how a guy who ate more in one month than most do in a whole day hated February, another about how a fat kid dying was a “mighty big loss,” and a musical number about the mapped-out life North will lead with so many rodeo-clad Liberace impersonators the sparkle of their ridiculous outfits will blind you.

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One could go destination by destination and critique every derivative, tasteless, unfunny "joke" North inflicts on its audience, but doing so would give the movie more attention than it deserves, even as an MST3K-esque exercise. In an era where alt-right lunatics condemn anything moderately progressive as “woke,” it’s easy to dismiss disdain for North’s particular brand of “comedy” as pearl-clutching, but it’s not. North is not offensive by the standard of modern mores, but because there is no universe in which it's funny, yet it’s clear it thinks it is in that blissfully ignorant '90s sort of way.

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Although, it’s frankly kind to even dismiss its “humor” as antiquated low blows at every ethnic group into which it sinks its grimy paws; in the film’s most bizarre sequence, North, having just experienced the Texes creepy attempt to transform him into their deceased, morbidly obese spawn, is skeptical of the Hawaiian Hos motives for taking him in. After inquiring as to whether they have a dead son whose shoes they want North to fill, Governor Ho says something truly bizarre:

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“North, Hawaii is a lush and fertile land. In fact, there’s only one barren area on all of our islands.”

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You know it’s coming. You know that he’s about to announce to the prepubescent child he and his wife are seeking to adopt that his wife is barren. You know he’s going to use that exact word, you know her infertility will get played for laughs, and yet, somehow, when he delivers the punchline of, “Unfortunately, it’s Mrs. Ho,” you still can’t believe it. You can’t accept that you live in a world where a kids' movie used a woman’s infertility as a joke, not because you’re offended by everything that can get construed as even mildly offensive, but because in no universe could someone struggling to get pregnant ever be funny. Sure, you can joke about anything, but some things just can’t be funny because there's nothing humorous about them. Mrs. Ho sure didn’t find it amusing; even she seemed shocked at her husband’s confession.

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Yet, you aren’t offended, just despondent. How in God’s green Earth did any of this get past studio executives, test audiences, and even the shriveled, delinquent mind that disturbingly conceived it in the first place? Why did no one have the mercy to recognize that they’d discovered the forgotten 11th plague of Egypt and let it slip right out of Hollywood’sPandora’s box?

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If there’s one good thing about North (and it's not meeting an Eskimo-faced Kathy Bates and watching as the Alaskan tribe commits genocide against its elderly), it's that it inspires the questions we need to ask as the world sits on the brink of a conservative takeover.

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If there is a God, and he truly loves us all, why does he let things like North happen to us? Is it a Noah’s Ark sort of thing, where he’s decided that humanity is heinous and unworthy, so he sends some cinematic cataclysm to wipe us out? If so, North will surely inspire a few to ponder what our species is worth if this is the toxin we inflict on the world.

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As with all movies and anything else, we must commend anything positive. For approximately 20 seconds, Alan Arkin, as the judge overseeing North’s petition to get emancipated from his parents, is somewhat funny. If you were one of the select few children who, when it came out, loved it for all its histrionic silliness in a way only a child could, then you may revisit it today and say, “Huh…” and nothing worse.

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There we go. That’s the positive, unless you’re trying to break the ice with a new friend group and use North’s incessant bellowing of the word “crack” as he bemoans the Hawaiian governor’s advertisement of a partially nude North as a drinking game. Although, if your idea of making friends is forcing them to watch this movie, you don’t deserve friends.
Some things simply shouldn’t be done. The world’s worst joke, about the Hawaiian alphabet making it easier to get into college, shouldn’t get told, especially when it takes an eternity to set up for such a dreadful punchline. A grown man should never tell a child not to travel somewhere hot so that his balls won’t stick to his leg. Lastly, in following the film’s“message,” kids shouldn’t be okay with shitty parents because it’s more convenient that way or out of some misplaced sense that blood relation matters beyond needing a bone marrow transplant.

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North sucks; no ifs, ands, or buts about it. It wasn’t overstated in 1994, it’s been mercifully forgotten despite Ebert’s infamous review, and the world would be better off if it’d had never gotten made in the first place. If you debase yourself by watching it, many blessings. You’ll need them.