Dragonball: Evolution Review

Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 04.12.2009

It couldn't possibly be worse than Street Fighter....could it?

Directed by: James Wong
Written by: James Wong & Ben Ramsay

Starring:
Justin Chatwin - Goku
James Marsters - Lord Piccolo
Jamie Chung - Chi Chi
Emmy Rossum - Bulma Briefs
Chow Yun-Fat - Master Roshi
Joon Park - Yamcha
Eriko Tamura - Mai
Randall Duk Kim - Grandpa Gohan
Ernie Hudson - Sifu Norris
Texas Battle - Carey Fuller
Luis Arrieta - Weaver



Running Time: 100 minutes
Rated PG for intense sequences of action/violence and brief mild language.

Hollywood has mined many a source for movies, particularly over the last several years. Where once only novels and stage plays tended to get the cinematic translation treatment, these days movie makers look to every source they can get their hands on, from comic books, television shows, and past films to video games, board games and even songs. Every medium that may has a potential built-in fan base seems to have come under scrutiny; it may come as a surprise then that manga and anime have yet to be deeply dug into. The Japanese print comics and animation features have long had a very devoted fan base, one that is quite prevalent worldwide. In the United States alone, manga is a nearly $200 million business and anime is a four billion dollar-plus market; in Asian markets, the revenue dwarfs that number. For whatever reason though, outside of big-screen releases of three Pokémon films, the widely-regarded Spirited Away and a Yu-Gi-Oh! movie, anime has not seen much action on American big screens. Hollywood is just now starting to tap into that market and the first to be released is Dragonball: Evolution, based on the highly successful Dragon Ball media franchise and starring Justin Chatwin, Chow Yun-Fat, Emmy Rossum and James Marsters.

Dragonball: Evolution begins with a narration to bring non-fans of the franchise up to speed, explaining that once upon a time, the evil Lord Piccolo (Marsters) attempted to destroy Earth with the help of his disciple, the demonic Oozaru. A group of monks captured Piccolo using a powerful enchantment that entrapped him in the world and cost all involved their lives. Now, two thousand years later, Piccolo has somehow escaped and, with the aid of his assistant Mai (Tamura), is seeking the Dragonballs, items of power that will allow him to summon the dragon spirit Sheng Long and make one perfect wish. His wish will involve, of course, the complete destruction of the world in retribution for his imprisonment. At the same time, a teenager by the name of Goku (Chatwin) is growing up with his grandfather Gohan (Duk Kim). Gohan trains Goku daily in mystical martial arts techniques, though he forbids him to fight and thus causes him to be the picked-on outcast at school. Goku wishes for something greater and pines after local high school hottie Chi-Chi (Chung). Upon turning eighteen his grandfather gives him a Dragonball, just in time to keep it out of Piccolo’s hands, and sends him off to find Master Roshi (Chow). Along the way he meets Bulma Briefs (Rossum), a gun-toting inventor who had a Dragonball of her own which was stolen, and upon discovering Roshi—and picking up the materialistic desert bandit Yamcha (Park)—they set out to try and get all the Dragonballs before the comic “blood moon” eclipse, during which the Dragonballs can be used to make that aforementioned perfect wish.

Confused yet? Then it’s likely you aren’t a Dragon Ball fan. The manga and anime series has an exceptionally dense mythology, one that is extremely difficult to explain in a compact time frame. This is the daunting task that Ben Ramsay undertook in attempting to craft the script, which was then re-written by director James Wong. It’s no exaggeration to say that they fail on almost every level. In attempting to bring in a script for the film that doesn’t run too long—we mustn’t risk the fan base (which the studio seemingly perceives to be nothing but sugar-hyped twelve-year-old manga fanboys) losing interest, after all—Wong and Ramsay proceed to hack enormous swaths of the series’ mythology out. This would be perfectly acceptable in most cases, as the studio is looking to appeal to a broader audience and not just the fans of the source, but in chopping these portions out, the duo leave an incoherent story with more plot holes and inconsistencies then there is actual substance. To say that the plot reads like Swiss cheese would only apply if there were more holes then actual dairy product. There is never any explanation given, for example, as to why Piccolo actually wants to destroy the world, other than “well, he’s a bad guy and he tried it once before, and the monks trapped him and now he’s pissed.” Mai, Piccolo’s henchman, is never actually named until the end credits, and there is no apparent reason why Goku is picked on at school except that he’s “different”—which doesn’t make a lot of sense, because outside of riding a bike instead of driving a cool sports car, he seems to be a lot like the guys picking on him. Whether there was more material that was cut out in the editing process is difficult to say, but it certainly seems as if enormous amounts of character development and subplots got large portions removed, particularly the relationships of Goku and Chi-Chi and especially Bulma and Yamcha; the latter duo do very little other than encounter each other as adversaries, trade halfwit barbs and then immediately fall in love for no discernable reason. One would also imagine that Roshi’s subplot of obtaining the ritual that will entrap Piccolo again was mostly wiped-out, as it serves no purpose other than to introduce Roshi’s mentor Sifu Norris, played by Ernie Hudson in little more than a cameo, and has no relevance to the climax. Even Lord Piccolo, the villain, gets a sheer minimum of screen time.

While the script wipes out all these elements of the plot that are needed to tell a coherent story, it certainly leaves time for cringe-worthy dialogue aimed at that perceived attention-deficit prepubescent fan base. We get lame one-liners from Yamcha such as “Cheese and rice, my nads got scorched!” and Roshi spouting off ridiculous dialogue like "If I die, tell my turtle he's gay!" The dialogue consists of some of the most cringe-inducing lines to hit big screens in quite a while, which is saying something when you consider films like Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li and while some of it is played purposely for camp-value laughs, the vast majority of it simply insults even a junior high school intelligence. Wong must be given the bulk of the blame for this one, since as director and the man who did the final work on the script the dialogue choices were his to keep or drop, and while he’s done some good writing work on projects like the first Final Destination and the television shows The X-Files and Millennium, he seems to be displaying more of the kinds of work that went into the abysmal films The One and Final Destination 3. Wong is simply aiming his standards low, and clearly doesn’t understand the fan base he’s working with. The Dragon Ball series has attracted fans of all ages, and there are very few that will be satisfied with the storyline as presented here, which removes anything remotely distinctive about the franchise with the exception of Lord Piccolo and the Dragonballs themselves.

As a director, Wong fails just as miserably here as he does in the writing. He resorts to the sort of wire-fu martial arts sequences and silly clichés that we’ve seen a thousand times, which only serves to further homogenize the film. The fight sequences are uninspired and lame, accentuated with silly and low-budget special effects; one particular fight sequence between Piccolo and Roshi basically consists of them holding their hands out and contorting their faces into strained looks while a laser light show goes on around them. Another fight scene involves the morphing of a character into a poorly-rendered monkey-demon thing, something that probably is supposed to look scary but instead just looks laughably silly. The one fight scene that has any semblance of fun to it, where Goku battles soldiers created from Piccolo’s blood, is shot and edited with very poor lighting so as to render it indistinguishable; one would imagine this is to hide the faulty special effects. Like with video game franchises, we get the usual bit of harnessing your inner power, which results in the heroes firing off balls of glowing energy from their hands after gathering it up, called the Kamehameha. Sure, this is a staple of the anime and manga franchise, but hearing it said by Roshi and Goku just makes it sound silly, far more so that it does within the anime series. The costuming choices is painfully bad for all involved, with Bulma sporting a blue/brunette look and an outfit that is supposed to be mildly sexy but just comes off funny, while Yamcha sports blonde highlights. Goku ends up wearing his trademarked orange gi by the end of the film, which may work for some fans but just ends up adding to the eye-rolling factor for everyone else.

If anything had a chance of saving the film considering the script and directorial choices, it was the cast, an impressive collection of talented actors. Unfortunately, they all seem to be in line with Wong’s vision of the film, and as a result they come off very poorly. Justin Chatwin, for starters, is far too old at twenty-eight to be playing an eighteen-year-old, no matter how young his face may look. Chatwin has done some good work in the past, most notably in The Invisible, but hampered by the terrible script he’s cringingly bad. He tries to deliver his lines with earnestness, throwing then deepest emoting he can into the horrible dialogue, but it just makes it all sound even worse. Emmy Rossum is a similarly talented actress who delivers terrible work as Bulma. She tries to play cool and the result is the kinds of acting you would see in direct-to-cable films. Joon Park is horribly bad in full surfer-dude mode as Yamcha and Eriko Tamura, who was so refreshing during her role in Volume Two of Heroes, has little to do but deliver martial arts kicks and provide a terrible foil for Piccolo’s dialogue. Speaking of Piccolo, James Marsters is perhaps the one person who comes out of this film not looking bad; with a digitally-enhanced voice, his grandiose, styled performance as Piccolo seems to fit the tone of the genre much more evenly and he doesn’t embarrass himself at all, though this may well be due to his lack of screen time. The same cannot be said for Chow Yun-Fat. Clearly, the role of Roshi must have been a fun one for the brilliant and award-winning actor to play, but Chow largely shames his distinguished body of work here. He overplays almost every scene he’s in, giving an achingly bad performance that is on par with Jeremy Irons’s work in Dungeons & Dragons or Sean Connery’s job in The Avengers. This is the kind of performance that Chow will have to work to shed off, which is very unfortunate considering the actor’s considerable talent.

The big question with most movies based on beloved properties is who will be happier between devoted fans of the source or the general public. While I’m not a particular fan or hater of the manga/anime franchise, I feel entirely comfortable saying that with Dragonball: Evolution, the question is more appropriately, “Who will hate the film more, fans or non-fans?” Fans will have plenty to despise, with the hacked-up story, poor characterizations and complete disrespect for the franchise and its fan base, while more general audiences will be turned off by the incoherent storyline that requires far too much understanding of the series to follow, the anemic special effects and the hokey moments that are there in an unsuccessful attempt to cater to Dragon Ball fans. The saddest thing about Dragonball: Evolution is outside of the opening narration that gives us the first sign of worry, the first twenty or twenty-five minutes actually point to a film that may have had some potential. By the time the set-up has passed and Piccolo has laid waste to Goku’s home however, it takes an immediate dive downhill…one from which it not only doesn’t recover, but doesn’t seem interested in trying to recover from. According to a recent interview with James Marsters, the franchise has already been greenlit for a sequel based on strong overseas revenue (the film was released in Japan a month ago). That the sequel is being given the go ahead may be Lord Piccolo’s greatest sin of all.

The 411: There's something for everyone to hate in Dragonball: Evolution, James Wong's big-screen adaptation of the wildly popular anima/manga series. From the bumbling and incomprehensible plot and agonizingly bad dialogue to the terrible performances by everyone except James Marsters, this is a complete misfire on every possible level. To say this film misses the mark is an understatement; it not only misses the mark, it flies completely by the entire target and buries itself to the hilt within the mud of Hollywood’s worst. While eleven-year-old boys may find a few things here and there to chuckle about, this is terrible on an almost unprecedented level, and has quickly pushed Push, Street Fighter and The Unborn out of the way in the quest to become the worst of 2009.

Final Score:  1.5   [ Extremely Horrendous ]