The movie Roger Ebert thought insulted its audience: “One of the worst movies ever made”
It’s difficult to maintain a perfect game. Whether it is bowling or a career in the film industry, providing a completely immaculate resume is impossible. Even the best filmmakers are prone to the odd stinker or two, with one Rob Reiner misfire provoking Roger Ebert to unload both barrels in one of the most scathing reviews the famed critic had ever written.
Ebert is one of the most famous critics in the world not because he was effortlessly charming or delivered his prose with a sense of shock jock bravado, but because he genuinely loved movies. He wasn’t defined by a particular style or genre; he didn’t devote himself to the purity of film as an art form. Roger Ebert just loved going to the movies and loved the movies that made him want to go in the first place. It means that for him to truly hate a production, something has gone terribly wrong. Rob Rener found this out the hard way.
With classics This Is Spinal Tap, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men accounting for six of his first seven features, Reiner was already regarded as one of the finest directors in the industry less than a decade into his career behind the camera, earning huge critical, commercial, and cult success as a result.
However, his eighth movie, North, proved to be an unmitigated disaster that critics savaged, crashed and burned at the box office, and landed six Golden Raspberry nominations, including ‘Worst Picture’ and ‘Worst Director’. Ebert, in particular, detested the film with an intense and burning passion, something he made perfectly clear in his review. There aren’t many times when, while reading Ebert’s review, you, as the audience, want to reach out a calming hand for his shoulder to let him know everything is going to be alright. But this is certainly one of them.
Named among his “most hated” films ever, Ebert didn’t shy away from offering his unfiltered thoughts: “I hated this movie,” he said. “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.”
North follows Elijah Wood’s title character, a precocious child who becomes legally emancipated from his distant parents before setting off on a journey to track down his ideal definition of the perfect mother and father. There’s no prize for screenwriting here. The premise, though not without its juvenile charm, is pretty basic. But one might expect its ensemble to help out the production.
The call-sheet is absolutely stacked, not only with truly great names but arguably the two best TV personalities of the age. It stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, Bruce Willis, Jon Lovitz, Dan Aykroyd, Alan Arkin, Kathy Bates, and a young Scarlett Johansson among the ensemble, but even all that star power couldn’t elevate the end product above disaster.
Expanding on his deep-seated disdain, Ebert couldn’t believe someone as talented as Reiner had managed to create something so unspeakably awful: “North is a bad film – one of the worst movies ever made,” he said. “But it is not by a bad filmmaker, and must represent some sort of lapse from which Reiner will recover – possibly sooner than I will.”
Ebert and long-time colleague Gene Siskel each named it the worst release of 1994 on TV, with the former calling it “one of the most thoroughly hateful movies in recent years” and making a point of exclaiming how he “hated this movie as much as any movie we have ever reviewed in the 19 years we’ve been doing this show”.
Suffice to say, Ebert was not thrilled with having to experience North himself, and the fact it turned out as disastrously as it did came as even more of a shock, considering Reiner’s track record was comparable to anybody else in Hollywood in terms of consistency and quality up until that point.
