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(More customer reviews)*1/2
For 102 mind-numbing minutes, "Norbit" plays like one long fat-person joke told over and over again in the vain hope that even if it wasn`t funny the first time, it will somehow improve with the repetition.
Eddie Murphy continues the shtick he started with "The Nutty Professor" of playing numerous characters in various guises buried under tons of prosthetic makeup. In "Norbit," Murphy appears as three characters: Norbit, the nerdy orphan who's never learned to stand up for himself; Rasputia, the obese shrew who ropes Norbit into marrying her; and Mr. Wong, the owner of the orphanage, who raised Norbit after he was unceremoniously dropped off there by his parents one fateful night in the late 1960`s. Norbit is all grown up now and living in a squeaky-clean, candy-colored, studio backlot small town inexplicably inhabited by both white-bread types straight out of Middle America and stripe-suited, Cadillac-driving street pimps fresh from the `hood.
There's no point in denying Murphy's skill at mimicry and impersonation, since the evidence is there in spades for all to see in "The Nutty Professor." But then "The Nutty Professor" gave Murphy an actual, honest-to-God screenplay off of which he could build his routines. In the case of "Norbit," if the studio had spent even a tenth of the time and effort on coming up with a good script as it did on designing fat suits and CGI-enhanced prosthetics, this might have been a decent comedy. As it is, it's just loud, obnoxious and offensive and wastes the talents of Thandie Newton, Cuba Gooding Jr., Marlon Wayans and Eddie Griffin into the bargain. Of course, as co-writer of the screenplay, Murphy has really no one but himself to blame for his being trapped in this fiasco.
When the only source of humor is making fun of fat people, and when that one note is played over and over and over again to ever diminishing results, you know it's time to cash in your chips and move on. The problem for "Norbit" is that a bad joke remains a bad joke - no matter how many times you tell it.
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Norbit (Eddie Murphy) has never had it easy.As a baby, he was abandoned on the steps of a Chinese restaurant/orphanage and raised by Mr. Wong (Eddie Murphy).Things get worse when he’s forced into marriage by the mean, junk food-chugging queen, Rasputia (Eddie Murphy).Just when Norbit’s hanging by his last thread, his childhood sweetheart, Kate (Thandie Newton), moves back to town.In the comedy Norbit, he’ll show them all that nice guys sometimes finish first.
