Norbit Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

Ridiculous... But Funny !

Saw this after a particularly grim day at work and thought nothing would bring me round... this did !! Ok it is daft, it is slapstick and it is patently ridiculous in the extreme... but it is also funny, in fact very funny in parts.

There are a few verbal jokes that are very close to the edge for a 12A rated film, if your kids laugh, you know they know too much !!!

I can see that the voice and some of the slapstick might be groaners for some viewers of this, and is it worth a 4 star, well it perked me up, and I definately would rate it as one for the rental list - go on, you know you want to !

Worst film of the year

Oh, Eddie. Oh, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie. What have you done? What were you thinking? Were you even thinking at all? After seeing this crap, all I wanted to do was get hold of Eddie Murphy and sit him down and show him some of his old films — you know, films like 48 Hours, Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop and Coming To America. Just to remind him that he was once a very funny man. Because now it seems that the only time Eddie Murphy is funny on screen is when he's being an ass.

Norbit is just a mess of a movie. It's nasty, misogynistic, racist, cruel and just not funny. I think I laughed just once through the whole film, and that was at a talking dog (talking dogs are always funny, no matter what anybody else tells you). As a romantic comedy, it lacks any originality. The characters are either stereotyped cliches (Mr Wong, the racist Chinese orphanage owner; Rasputia's dumb-as-a-stump, bully-boy brothers; the fast-talking pimps), deadly dull (Norbit himself) or irredeemably awful — Rasputia. What can I say about her, apart from the fact that she is probably the most evil, vile character to appear on screen since George W Bush gave his last State of The Union address.

Eddie Murphy should have learned his lesson from the Martin Lawrence abomination, Big Momma's House — the days when you can make fun of fat women, and especially fat black women, are long gone. It's no surprise he didn't win an Oscar for Dreamgirls; the Academy voters must have seen Norbit and immediately burned his name from their minds. The only person who walks away from this wreck with their dignity intact is makeup supremo Rick Baker, who did the prosthetics for Mr Wong and Rasputia. Baker — who has won 6 Oscars and worked on such films as Star Wars, An American Werewolf In London, Coming To America, Men In Black and Hellboy — can hold his head high. His work, as always, is outstanding. Everybody else (yes, including you, Thandie Newton) should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.