Dragonball Evolution

As I think back on this movie, my thoughts turn to Matt Friedman and Chris G. Willingham. They were the editors on this movie, and I can only imagine their first day on the job as they took their first look at the unassembled footage, and tried to make a coherent film out of it. They have failed miserably, but they are not entirely at fault. It looks like director James Wong (best known for his work on the Final Destination horror films) had no idea what movie he was making in the first place. He just threw a bunch of stuff up at the screen, hoping that something, anything, would stick.

Dragonball Evolution is the most incomprehensible experience I've had at the movies this year, and for once, it's not due to lack of familiarity with the original source material. My memory on the details may be a little fuzzy, but I was a fan of the original Japanese cartoon series and comic by Akira Toriyama when I was younger. The movie is a conceptual nightmare that has to be seen to be believed. The movie itself is constantly switching tones, the performances are all over the map as if everyone thought they were doing a different movie, even when they're in the same scene together, and the whole thing feels like it's been hacked and edited to pieces in order to fit a slim 80 minute run time. Nothing in those 80 minutes made me want to see what wound up on the cutting room floor. The movie can't even seem to decide where the story is supposed to be taking place. Sometimes it seems to be set in Japan, sometimes a high-tech high school, sometimes a third rate knock off of the futuristic landscape from Blade Runner, sometimes a volcano world that looks like something out of a Godzilla movie, sometimes a desert wasteland...The characters jump from one location to the next with little rhyme, reason, or explanation.

Our hero is Goku (Justin Chatwin), a teenage martial artist whose main ambition in life seems to be a clone of Peter Parker from the Spider-Man films. In fact, the film's opening 30 minutes seem to be so heavily inspired by the opening half of the original Spider-Man movie, I felt like I was watching Chatwin's lost audition tape for the role at times. Instead of Uncle Ben, Goku has Grandpa Gohan (Randall Duk Kim), who comes across as a bundle of "old mentor" cliches looking for direction. And instead of Mary Jane, Goku has Chi Chi (Jamie Chung), the most popular girl in school who originally hangs out with the bullies who torment Goku (They call him "Geek-o". )but takes a shine to him when she finds out he can use his martial arts energy to open stuck locker doors. Before our hero gets a chance with the girl, an evil alien being named Piccolo (James Marsters) descends from his airship and kills Grandpa Gohan. Piccolo was looking for a Dragonball, which is a mystical object that, when joined with six other Dragonballs can grant a "perfect wish". (Not just a wish, mind you, but a "perfect wish".) When Piccolo arrives, the Dragonball has been taken by Goku, who took it before he left for a party at Chi Chi's house. Why did Goku take it with him? Why, indeed.

Goku returns home, finds gramps is dead, and sets out for vengeance. He's quickly joined by a feisty, gun-toting tomboy scientist named (I kid you not) Bulma Briefs (Emmy Rossum). She's after the Dragonballs as well, and even has a device to track them down. They're also joined by Master Roshi (Chow Yun-Fat), a slightly perverted martial arts master that Gohan told Goku to seek out before he died. The last character to join the team is a desert bandit named Yamcha (Joon Park), who wasn't really needed in the movie at all. They have a brief encounter with some ooze monsters that Piccolo sends after them, but most of the time, they're harassed by his sole henchman, a woman named Mai (Japanese pop artist Eriko Tamura), who dresses like a cheesy 80s backup dancer most of the time, and sometimes disguises herself as other people in order to fool Goku and steal his Dragonballs. It all leads up to an anticlimactic final scene with some of the cheesiest special effects I've seen in a mainstream movie, and a hint at sequels to come which, given the quality on display here means that the filmmakers are entirely too optimistic about their own effort.

For the entire length it runs, Dragonball Evolution is as banal and as inept as any movie to limp onto the screen this year. The performances run a broad range of over the top to the point of total cheese (Chow Yun-Fat often seems to act like he's starring in a parody of martial arts films), to just plain disinterest. (Justin Chatwin as Goku either puts no emotion in his line readings, or his readings are so off, they literally got unintentional laughs from the audience. His plea to save a friend's life near the end of the film had the audience at my screening roaring.) However, the basic problem lies at the screenplay by Ben Ramsey. The characters he writes have foggy motivations at best, and are completely indecipherable at worst. The relationship between Goku and Chi Chi never builds, nor does it seem to be built out of anything except they both know martial arts. A romantic subplot between Bulma and Yamcha is even less developed. And why are we supposed to feel a sense of urgency when the two villains spend most of their screen time standing on the deck of their airship, looking down at the ground below with disgust? The fact that head villain Piccolo looks kind of like the Jolly Green Giant after Slim Fast doesn't help matters.

And then there's the budget, which here seems to have been spent mainly on the rubber boulders that fall around the actors during the climax, and some sub-par CG work that's not convincing in the least. The original cartoons were known for their colorful visuals, so why does everything look so drab and dull here? I fear this is becoming a regular thing for the Fox studio. Just two months ago, they brought us Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, which turned the video game's famed visuals into a dreary and "edgy" nightmare. Just like that movie, everything here is so completely devoid of life that there's nothing to care about or admire. This is such a soulless and cynical enterprise, you're left grasping for some sign of inspiration. As the realization dawned on me that there was none, I sunk into my seat and waited for it to end.

Dragonball Evolution is even inept right up to the end. As the end credits begin to roll, we witness one last scene, that shows a woman very slowly working in her garden. The camera lingers on it so long, we know it's leading up to something. She then very slowly walks into her house, and prepares some food, very slowly of course. As she very slowly made her way down the hall, I started to get restless. The final reveal (which I will not spoil) is, like the rest of the sequence, dragged out to ridiculous and tedious lengths. We've figured it out long before the movie shows it to us, so by the time we do see it, we're already halfway out the door.

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