Meet Dave

The funniest thing about Meet Dave is that one of the credited screenwriters is Bill Corbett. Corbett was one of the head writers and stars of the 90s cult hit TV show devoted to bad movies, Mystery Science Theater 3000. Seeing his name here makes me think he still had bad movies on the brain when he wrote this uninspired and dull family comedy about tiny aliens coming to Earth. Take away the big budget and the name star above the title, and this movie would be right at home on the show he used to work on, and would be rightfully ridiculed.

Meet Dave reunites Eddie Murphy with his Norbit director, Brian Robbins. The good news is that this is a vast improvement over their last collaboration. The bad news is that's not saying much. As is usual in his recent films, Murphy plays a dual role. He plays the Captain of a race of microscopic intergalactic travelers who have come to Earth to save their far off world. He also plays their vessel, a giant robot/spaceship that looks and talks exactly like the Captain. The aliens pilot the robot from within, trying to fit in with human society, as they seek an orb that belongs to them and crashed on Earth three months ago. The orb is designed to destroy the Earth so that their planet can live by "borrowing" our world's resources. But, shortly after arriving on Earth, the aliens befriend a single mom named Gina (Elizabeth Banks) and her young son, Josh (Austin Myers), who discovered the orb when it initially crashed, and has been holding onto it ever since. The more time that the Captain and his crew spend around the humans, the more interested they become in our society, and begin to doubt their own mission.

Take that bare bones premise, and stretch it to the breaking point of 90 minutes, and you pretty much have the movie right there. To call Meet Dave padded is an understatement. The movie kind of sits there, unsure of what to do with itself. It throws in some subplots, such as a pair of cops who suspect that "Dave" (the name the giant robot the aliens pilot goes by) is not from around here, and a concerned neighbor of Gina's, but does absolutely nothing with its own material. It sets it up, and then forgets about it, so it can focus on more uninspired antics by Murphy and his co-stars. Not even the plots amongst the aliens themselves are developed to any real degree. There's a shy relationship between the Captain and a fellow crew member (Gabrielle Union), the crew's weapons specialist discovers he's gay after watching only 10 seconds of a Broadway musical, just so the movie can throw in some tired "flaming" stereotype humor (which seems very out of place in a movie targeted at kids), and the ship's second in command (The Daily Show's Ed Helms) stages a mutiny when he fears that the Captain is too interested in the Earthlings, and has forgotten the mission. In any other movie, these could have been workable storylines (okay, probably not the one about the weapons specialist...), but here they're just thrown about the plot at random, and genuinely ignored.

Meet Dave is quite literally a crashing bore. I was sitting there, seeing all this money thrown up on the screen, and I had to wonder what anyone saw in this project. It does not want to entertain, it does not want to inspire, and despite its imaginative premise, it does not want to be original. Say you were assigned with the task of writing a comedy about tiny aliens coming to Earth in a giant robot body to study us. Think of the possibilities and imagination such a premise would inspire. Would those possibilities you come up with include Murphy literally shooting money out of his rear end (and later hot dogs)? Would they include Murphy singing the Bee Gee's "Staying Alive" in a goofy voice for no reason? Would they include product placements for Old Navy? This is a commercially bankrupt film that did not have a single thought put into it, aside from how the filmmakers could make this as bland and lifeless as possible. And yes, I do think this was intentional. At one point maybe, this was a creative and witty concept, and maybe even a real screenplay. Then some studio heads got a hold of it, and tried to dumb it down as much as possible. The end result is a movie that will most likely already be gone before August hits. (Judging by how vacant my screening was.)

The summer movie season of 2008 has been one of the strongest in recent memory, so there's absolutely no reason for anyone to waste their time with Meet Dave. Kids will be bored, and adults will spend a majority of their time looking at their watches as the minutes slowly tick by. When it's done, you walk out a little bit sadder, and with a little less money in your wallet. No one needs that, and no one needs this movie. Murphy's career has survived much worse films (Norbit and Pluto Nash, anyone?), but if this is the best material he can find, he needs a good long vacation.

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