Norbit

Eddie Murphy used to be a comic genius. What the hell happened? He’s still a big-money player in this town, with his voice work on the Shrek series and his Oscar nomination for Dreamgirls. But how do you explain The Haunted Mansion, Daddy Day Care, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, The Klumps, and this piece of shit? (I haven’t seen all of these, I admit it, but the reviews were awful. Pluto Nash got a 12 at Metacritic, one of the lowest scores ever. The best review said: “Eddie Murphy’s latest comedy, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, takes place in the year 2087, which is about the earliest he can hope to be forgiven.”) But he’s got 5 movies in the pipeline, including Shrek 4 and a Romeo and Juliet “reimagining” (color me dubious), and three of them have interesting premises. I sure hope they work. This film worked for about ten minutes, when I laughed at Norbit’s back story. Then it descended into horrors. Apparently black people like to see racial stereotypes of themselves up on the screen, or at least enough of them do that crap like this gets made for them. Pimps and hos, pimps and hos. Sigh. Eddie plays a lot of parts in this one, too: A Chinese man, Norbit, his totally disgusting, obese wife Rasputia, and, I think, the little pug dog Rasputia runs over in an unfunny scene. I started FFing at about the 30 minute mark. The only thing positive I can say about Norbit is that fat suits have gotten incredibly good. All that jiggling flesh on Rasputia looked as real as could be … oh, the horror … the horror …