More about Evolution than Dragonball, but at least they keep the characters' names...
Written: Apr 17 '09 (Updated Apr 20 '09)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: looks good, likable actors
Cons: Making Dragonball into a movie? As Dr. Phil says, what were you thinking?!
The Bottom Line: Dragonball Evolution is instantly forgettable if you're not a fan of the series and a source of great frustration if you are. How cool is that?
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| wrestler's Full Review: Dragonball Evolution |
Dragonball Evolution is to the manga series it's based on what "based on a true story" movies are to the true stories they are based on. The movie takes more liberties with the content of the DB mangas than Robin Williams does with the scripts of his one-man shows. The escapism the film will provide to those unfamiliar with the series is mediocre at best, while hardcore fans will find the experience puzzling. That's in a best case scenario.
However, frustration is what awaits most DB die-hards. Adapting successful books, graphic novels and video games to the big screen is hardly a recent phenomenon, but when trying to pick one of those to use as a cash cow, one could hardly have made a more bizarre and ill-advised choice than Dragonball. Maybe that's why it hadn't been made until now.
How do you adapt the content of a 42-volume series to the big screen successfully? Of course, you won't do it all at once. But even then, guess what pal, it's not happening! There is too much ground to cover, the characters are too numerous, they evolve too much, too slowly and too subtly for this to project well as a movie.
The result is that the moviemakers have to distort the story so much that die-hard fans will barely recognize it, apart from what the script people and the editors got wrong. Seems to me that this defeats the purpose of making this film, but no matter. The purpose is, as always, to make money. So let us move on.
Canadian Justin Chatwin is the series hero Goku who, in the film, is an 18-year-old high schooler (yes, fans such as myself, I know). Why? So we can watch generic teenage movie scenes in which he gets bullied by the usual school idiots because he's promised his grandfather Gohan (Randall Duk Kim) not to use his fighting skills. It's tradition in all types of movies that we find the gorgeous women hanging around such dim-witted bozos until the nice guys finally toughen up and swipe them off their feet. The flaw in this premise, naturally, is that girls shallow and stupid enough to date guys like that are probably too shallow and stupid to see the nice guys' worth. That's unless they patiently sing "Some day my prince will come" every day in the shower, waiting for the gentlemen to show up, but I digress.
In this case, the gorgeous girl is Chi-Chi, played by the truly gorgeous Jamie Chung. She likes Goku and thinks she and he are much alike, although she waits until after he deals with the bullies to tell him. Why? So we can watch a rather slickly-done fight scene during which he disposes of them, or should I say, lets them dispose of themselves.
However, more serious danger looms. Lord Piccolo (James Marsters) has escaped his incubator after being trapped in there 2,000 years ago thanks to a technique called the Mafuba. He is looking for the seven dragonballs as a part of his plan to conquer the world. For those who don't know, finding the seven dragonballs enables one to summon the sacred dragon Shenron, who then grants any wish.
Another part of Piccolo's plan to have his disciple Oozaru return, which can only happen during a solar eclipse that conveniently is a few days away. The true identity of Oozaru will be obvious to fans of the series because of a vision of him that we get which gives away what he looks like. Piccolo also has a sidekick (Eriko Tamura), whose job is, in a nutshell, to beat up people and/or shoot them while looking awfully pretty in her red leather suit.
In his search for the dragonballs, Piccolo ends up crossing paths with Gohan, who has had one for a long time and has just given it to Goku as a birthday present. Problem is, when Piccolo shows up looking for it, Goku is at Chi-Chi's place, where she's having a party (yes, fans such as myself, I know). We can all guess what happens to Gohan. The day after the party, Goku meets the spunky techno wiz Bulma (Emmy Rossum), who is also looking for the dragonballs. And so they embark on a quest to find them and stop Piccolo's plan. One character worthy of mention is Master Roshi. Chow Yun-Fat is the old master who takes Goku's training to a new level. I choose to blame his over-acting clinic on the direction.
If you haven't read the mangas, here is what you need to know. The fight scenes are well done with good special effects and the film in general is well made. In addition to that, there is some likable talent on that screen. However, the plot is not original. And the worst thing about it is that among the details left out for filmmaking purposes are many of those that made DB interesting as a series. Goku gets a ton of screen time, but here, he's not interesting enough to warrant it, and neither are the others. Writer Ben Ramsey takes away the characters' personalities and replaces them with moves and one-liners, seemingly expecting it to work. It never works, so why would it here?
On top of that, the actors are poorly directed, so they aren't convincing and much of the dialogue is less than inspired, even by action-oriented manga standards. You might not have a bad time per se, but if you've got nothing to do, your time is probably better spent elsewhere.
All this being said, this movie will annoy its primary target audience, which is the fans of the mangas. Noticed the two notes to fans such as myself in the review? I could've dropped one at every paragraph because the countless omissions and modifications to the original story will have die-hards wincing from beginning to end. I know I did.
But as many flaws as the movie has, I think it fails because it was doomed to fail. The idea to make the Dragonball series into a film was ill-advised in a way that I'm not certain I can describe as overly amibitious, but I am tempted to do so. The makers of this movie did try to bite something bigger than what they could chew in the sense that it was not a realistic project to begin with. In a feature writing class, our teacher asked us to come up with plausible story ideas, insisting on the plausible part. "Don't come and tell me you're going to interview Barack Obama, he said. It's not happening." The people who made this movie would have greatly benefited from bumping into a studio executive like that.
Recommended:
No
Movie Mood: Action Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Plot
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Epinions.com ID:
wrestler
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Member: Alexandre Turp
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Reviews written: 163
Trusted by: 17 members
About Me:
Evolution is all that matters.
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