North

Based on a novel by Alan Zweibel, North follows the eleven-year-old title character (Elijah Wood) as he decides to head off on a worldwide search for a new mother and father after tiring of his parents’ (Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) callous indifference – with his efforts eventually complicated by a conniving sixth grader (Matthew McCurley’s Winchell) and a sleazy lawyer (Jon Lovitz’s Arthur Belt). It’s rather surprising to note that – for its first half, at least – North is actually quite engaging and entertaining, as filmmaker Rob Reiner has infused the proceedings with a breezy, fast-paced sensibility that’s heightened by the irresistibly irreverent nature of Zweibel and Andrew Scheinman’s script (ie the movie feels like a children’s book come to life). The watchable atmosphere persists even through the narrative’s decidedly uneven midsection, which is devoted to North‘s progressively uninteresting efforts at finding replacement folks – with the episodic nature of this section ensuring that certain parts fare a whole lot better than others. It’s only as the film enters its increasingly unpleasant third act that North begins to go south, as Zweibel and Scheinman’s emphasis on both action-oriented elements and the aforementioned (and thoroughly tedious) Winchell/Belt subplot ensures that the whole thing peters out in as demonstrable a manner as one could’ve envisioned. It’s a shame, really, as movie initially holds a fair amount of promise, with the nigh unwatchable final half hour inevitably (and lamentably) canceling out the uniformly charismatic performances and Reiner’s zippy directorial choices.

** out of ****