Hola all. Massawyrm here.
Wow, was this a monumentally bad idea. Actually, it was a number of bad ideas. And the result was a terribly crappy movie that has already alienated the DRAGONBALL fanbase (many of whom downloaded illegal copies online and have long been ranting about it) and will do little to bring over new blood to the series now considered by many to be a classic. It’s just plain bad – not the worst of the year by far – but it is bad enough to want to avoid without ever being bad enough to be gloriously awful. There’s no fun here, just fail; a weak, terrible movie that tries very hard to condense an entire series into 80 some odd minutes. Yeah. Great idea, guys.
The first thing I don’t understand is the need or desire to see anime adapted to live action. If you want to see anime on the bigscreen…fucking show anime on the bigscreen. Anime rocks. It’s an artform all its own. You can do things in anime that you CANNOT do in a live action feature film, so why try? DRAGONBALL was a comic book series. These are comic book characters. Their power levels aren’t that of simple martial artists – they are closer to that of super heroes. Of gods. They can fly, teleport, throw energy around like it was nothing, blows holes in the earth and toss each other into the sun. There was even a character that survived contact with the sun before coming back to get his ass kicked again. This is what Anime is for. You can do stuff like that there. Doing it in a film is far trickier.
The DRAGONBALL universe was never conducive to film. The characters are goofy, the action over the top and a bulk of the television show more about striking a pose and talking trash than it was about actually kicking ass. The first thing you have to do is establish a universe in which these kinds of things can happen while not turning off the audience. That never happens here. The world is just silly and gets sillier by the minute. It doesn’t feel real. It feels like a mishmash of ideas from the show thrown together that never congeal into a universe I felt like I was transported to. The second thing you have to do is bring over enough elements from the show to make it, you know, THE SHOW. But as this is a film, you also need to give us a reason why each of those elements are there. Here we have characters that are clearly from the show, but only a handful of them are relevant to the story. At all.
One character is so superfluous I would have forgotten about his existence had he not barged his way into every scene to make his presence known. He never does anything to warrant needing him around. He’s just there. Acting like some douchebag fratboy, doing the worst Paul Walker impression I’ve ever heard. There’s Emmy Rossum as some chick with guns who has built a Dragonball detector, but has to hang around to use it rather than handing it off to our hero. So they try to give her shit to do as well. But never anything interesting. That leaves us with a handful of important characters, none of whom are more than mere impressions of their animated counterparts. They have no soul – no dimension.
So at least the action is cool, right? No. In what I consider to be the worst idea of all, DRAGONBALL: EVOLUTION was made under the modern 20th Century Fox adaptation guidelines: acquire a popular title with a built in fanbase (like ERAGON, HITMAN, THE SEEKER, STREET FIGHTER) then dump as little money as possible into it as they can without making it look like they weren’t trying. Then they leave their directors out to dry, trying to make the best films they can without the money to do so. And that is certainly the case here. DRAGONBALL fights are supposed to be epic. They are about truly powerful beings throwing each other through structures and teleporting and beating the living shit out of one another. These fights should have been Hulk/Abomination or Neo/Agent Smith. Instead they are slightly more colorful versions of the fight at the end of THE COVENANT.
Honestly though, I can’t totally blame director James Wong. The few rare moments that work here do so under his direction. There’s one scene between Goku and Chi Chi which mixes martial arts and teen romance to a solid effect. And Chow Yun-Fat has moments of excellence as Master Roshi. But Wong does let the douchebag fratboy hijack every scene he stinks it up in and he somehow manages to make Emmy Rossum tragically not hot (which is just a crime against nature.) However, most everything here seems to hinge upon the sparse budget. Everything here feels small – the world, the fights, the power levels - especially for a story that feels like it wants to be big.
Sadly this is just another case of franchise fucked into the dirt over profit margin considerations. While I’m not convinced that a truly great live action DRAGONBALL adaptation could ever exist, with the right amount of money they could have at least made a very pretty one that was fun to watch. This isn’t that. This isn’t that at all. It is the very model of what we have come to expect from FOX. Nothing more, nothing less.
It’s not even fun to rip on. STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN LI was far worse – but far more fun by comparison.
Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.
Massawyrm
NASH OUT!
Or follow my further zany adventures on Twitter. 