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🔒 In Defense of Rob Reiner's "North"

S Peter Davis

19 Dec 2025 — 12 min read

One of the worst movies ever made depends on your metric.

Rob Reiner’s final film was a sequel to his very first film.

This, obviously, was not planned. It’s a fact that will be remarked upon in history, but Reiner didn’t have the ability to foresee and plan for the end of his own career in the same way that, for example, David Bowie, facing a cancer diagnosis drawn out enough to assemble one last album, was able to bookend the fate of Major Tom in his final hit.

Rob Reiner and his wife, tragically, pointlessly, godawfully, seem to have ended their lives at the end of a knife wielded by their own son after a loud argument they had about him acting really creepy to everyone at a celebrity bash at Conan O’Brien’s house. They just wanted to get him out and show him a good time to try to dig him out of a bad mental place. It was a wrong move. It sucks. The whole thing sucks.

Rob Reiner wasn’t a household name. He wasn’t Spielberg or James Cameron or Ridley Scott or even Ron Howard, whose name I often mix up with Reiner’s by mistake. But even if you don’t know him, you know him.

Ron Howard and Rob Reiner: Two different bald, beard guys who were friends!

From the starting line—from the very first feature he ever directed—Reiner’s first seven films not just went on to become classics, but some are even popularly regarded to be among the greatest movies ever made. One after the other, hit after hit after hit. Those movies are This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men.

Then he made North.

Fans of military courtroom thrillers were very cautiously optimistic about the poster release.

It’s not so simple to say that North broke a winning streak. He didn’t just stutter. This wasn’t just a relative disappointment from a director who had generated unusually high expectations, like when Coppola made The Godfather III. This was much closer to when Coppola made Jack.

Fans of dramatic gangland Mafia thrillers were cautiously whaaaaaaat the fuuuuuck-

North is, in cinephile lore, up there with Ishtar, Showgirls, and the live action Super Mario Brothers Movie. That is to say, among the worst films ever made, but not even bad in a way that makes people want to watch them.

Nor can this be chalked up as just the first sign of Reiner being, like all creatives, human and prone to the occasional misstep. Reiner was, after all, a very adventurous filmmaker. He took risks, tried new things, never pigeonholed himself once in his 40 year career. This is part of the reason why his name was relatively obscure. A lot of casual movie audiences would be very surprised that the same man who made the romcom When Harry Met Sally also made the courtroom thriller A Few Good Men, let alone the fantasy adventure The Princess Bride, the screwball comedy mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, and the Stephen King horror Misery.

But the miraculous thing is, by most people’s reckoning, Rob Reiner never made another terrible movie in his further 30-year career. I think the only subsequent Reiner film that bombed really badly is the Bruce Willis/Michelle Pfeiffer romcom The Story of Us, but it doesn’t carry the same notoriety as North.

He also never made another truly classic movie, although I would argue that some come close, such as The American President (his next film after North,) and The Bucket List (which actually originated the term “bucket list” even though most people seem to think this is a boomer expression from way back. Nope, Rob Reiner came up with that.)

Before the news about Reiner’s murder, I had never seen North. But its existence was brought up occasionally amidst the memories, the praise, and the good humor that came with his fans’ varying expressions of mourning. Lots of talk about his death being “inconceivable.” One user on Substack Notes accused me of making a sickening, bad-taste joke for honestly praising his talent as “going up to 11,” as though the famously humorless director of This Is Spinal Tap would be offended by high praise delivered via a line from his own movie.

On the same weekend as the Sydney terror attack and the Brown University mass shooting, I feel this one is also relevant

North, after all, was Rob Reiner’s albatross for his entire career. I think the most significant reason for its notoriety is its zero-stars review by the great Pulitzer Prize winning critic Roger Ebert.

Ebert had a wit that could slice titanium and took no prisoners when it came to what he didn’t like. In Reiner’s 2000 New York Friars Club roast, late actor Richard Belzer (who played a character named John Munch in a wide-spanning multiverse of TV and film, including, possibly, North) asked Reiner to read a portion of Ebert’s review aloud to the audience. It was this same review from which Ebert’s book that same year, a collection of his most negative reviews, derived its title: I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie.