Norbit

“Norbit”

USA. 2007. Directed by Brian Robbins. Story by Eddie Murphy and Charles Q. Murphy. Screenplay by Eddie Murphy, Charles Q. Murphy, Jay Scherick and David Ronn. Starring: Eddie Murphy, Thandie Newton, Terry Crews, Clifton Powell and Cuba Gooding, Jr.

Rating: ½

“Norbit” is one of the most oddly unpleasant films I’ve ever seen and that’s saying a lot considering the number of Eddie Murphy bombs that have come out in recent years. It’s so bad and out of touch with human nature that it plays like a minstrel show of the ugliest stereotypes gone horribly out of control. If you’re looking for most everything that’s wrong with the Hollywood studio system these days and Murphy’s periodic lapses into gross excess, you’ll find it here.

So “The Nutty Professor” made money because they made a funny, entertaining film out of putting Eddie Murphy playing different characters in a fat suit. So let’s get the most awesome makeup artists in Hollywood and convincingly dress Murphy in a fat suit again – great idea, right? The problem with many Hollywood studio executives is that they learn the words but never study the music. All great comedians instinctively know that appearance alone is not funny and the material, not the delivery, should primarily elicit the laughs. Murphy himself has understood this idea and realized his potential in films such as “The Nutty Professor" and "Coming to America" but not here.

As I watched this completely laugh-proof, alleged comedy, I could almost imagine the four writers of this film including Murphy himself having a committee meeting, brainstorming every single fodder for broad stereotyping on a chalkboard and testing its limits to offend and disgust. Let’s see what we can think of: obese people, Asians, pimps, children, old people and, just to be sure, women, too. This may sound like I’m just trying to get all politically correct but the movie’s most egregious offense is that all the jokes, PC or not, are just ugly and unfunny.

Every scene from the opening of the title character, Norbit’s grotesque childhood of being adopted by his Chinese restaurant owner, Mr. Wong to the last frame of the shrill, overweight Rasputia swinging a shovel around in a brawl is just flat, dull and depressing. Eddie Murphy, of course, plays all these characters, although they are not so much performances as licenses for cheap shots. It is all the more distressing to watch Murphy fumbling and bumbling about in these roles because I know deep down inside he is an intelligent individual who’s just made a series of unfortunate decisions here.

Norbit has no friends as a kid other than Kate and they share a kind of sweet puppy love. You know your movie is in trouble when this little 2-minute montage is the best and sweetest thing your movie has to offer. Well, minus the bit where the two kids are shown pooping next to each other in adjacent toilets. Try explaining that to the child actors…

Of course, Kate goes away and, enter, the most aggressively obnoxious character in the film, Rasputia. She becomes Norbit’s girlfriend literally by brute force – on others who tease Norbit and Norbit himself. As adults, Norbit and Rasputia tie the knot and Rasputia turns out to be a real witch of a wife. Rasputia's equally brutish brothers also terrorize Norbit when not taking every opportunity to call a woman they see a "ho" or the profane word that rhymes with "witch."

In other insulting comedies, the cheap, humorless gags on Rasputia’s girth and weight (including the beaten down, "emptying the pool in one splash" joke) would be the cause of ruin, but in “Norbit,” they are the least of the film’s problems. This film goes several steps further to include those jokes as part of Rasputia’s overall diabolical, oppressive nature, including cheating on Norbit at will and preventing him from ever leaving by crushing him physically and emotionally. This is not ugly caricature drawing, but mean-spirited squashing of human decency.

Kate the nice girl, now played by Thandie Newton, comes back into Norbit’s life and is obviously his highway to happiness. To be fair, Murphy and Newton do have a couple of moments of sweetness together, but everything around them is so aggressively offensive that you look for whether even these scenes are meant as shallow jokes. Do I have to make a point of the fact that Kate is model-thin? No, because Rasputia and the movie do it already, in yet another bitter diatribe towards skinny people, which I guess is meant to be a counterattack to all the fat jokes the filmmakers aim at Rasputia. Not that it makes it any less awful or unfunny…

So will Norbit be able to free himself of Rasputia’s clutches? Will he be able to prevent Kate from marrying that jerk of a boyfriend and get her back? Am I supposed to focus enough to care when I’m rolling my eyes most of the time? I could go on and on, but no, I would like to stop. I don’t want to devote more thought and energy to this piece of junk than its makers did.