So, in the wonderful spirit of the Easter weekend, our friends at hollywood in the delightful spirit of the holiday decide to miss the point with the release of Dragonball Evolution.
In short, its bad and not in that, "Let's watch it because there are motherfucking Snake on a Plane" bad. No, its just bad in any sort of sense, direction and anything that has to do with the anime itself.
I'm not even going to review this from that anime fan standpoint because, to be honest, Dragonball and Dragonball Z were pretty mediocre anime's and annoying when faced with the English Dub.
Moving on to Dragonball Evolution, with a title like that you'd think Charles Darwin would start to kick in doors and start throwing down some Kamahameha's.
Nope, in fact it literally is just a cool name thrown into the title. That's it. Evolution is just a pointless name thrown into the title. There, I just saved you from pondering it.
What made Dragonball Evolution allright for me (at first) was that I walked in expecting it to be bad and when that happened I actually started to enjoy the film. It played off like an odd (very odd) OC episode, but it was forgivable because you saw the plot going...well...somewhere.
Then, right about the emergence of Bulma, the movie just goes downhill and it doesn't go up at all. In fact with the emergence of Yamcha the movie just plummets faster and faster to the depths of suck.
I didn't even bother watching the ending. I got it from Wikipedia and was elated to know that I wasted $7.50.
The plot...hoo boy...
Let me give you a brief glimpse of what the plot was like in my mind. It was like 6 writers got into a fist fight over what they can bring into the movie. In the middle of the jabs they threw in some plot none of which ever really made sense. If there was something major that we were supposed to know about we get very little to (I'm not kidding) zero explanation to what's going on and are expected to believe it at face value.
MOVIE: Here you go.
MOVIE GOER: I'm not sure I understand...
MOVIE: YOU SHUT YOUR WHORE MOUTH AND TAKE IT SLUT!
MOVIE GOER: Wha...
MOVIE: I SAID SHUT THE FUCK UP AND MAKE ME A SAMMICH!
To make matters worse the actors in every way were not into the film. You could tell that they are good actors, but they were only good if they gave a shit. It literally felt like I was watching a stage play of people not giving a shit about what's in front of them. Just something to get paid for.
At one point the acting was so fucking bad that you wonder why they even bothered to try hard at other points.
There is a scene in the movie, after meeting Yamcha, that they locate a dragonball and the need excavation equipment to get to it to which Goku says:
GOKU: Hey and...bring some EXCA-VATION...equipment.
It was like this kid took acting lessons from the William Shatner school of acting. There is litereally no excuse for that kind of crap.
To make matters even worse (going back to the plot) most of the characters besides Goku and Roshi have no reason to tag along. Yamcha, literally, has NO REASON to come along and is pretty much just there for the fans. "Hi, I'm Yamcha, I'm just here."
Also, back to the plot, the budding romance between Goku and Chi Chi...oh man...
George Lucas love plots are more structured and believeable than between Goku and Chi Chi. It was laughable and completely embarressing to watch. It was taking itself too serious.
Now you must be wonder, "But what about Piccalo?". Why haven't I mentioned him? Well, no shit, he gets about 15 minutes of screen time and gets less than 10 lines of dialouge. Someone find the fucking script because that is the no shit truth. All we get is random shots of Piccalo in the movie to remind us that, yes, he is in fact the villian.
Running about 1 hour and 22 minutes this movie is over about the time it started. There is no build-up or rising action because we are thrown right into the film right until the very end.
I'd hate to say this, but...with the Dragonball movie...HOLLYWOOD MISSED THE POINT! That's really fucking hard to do and yet they managed to do it.
Don't even go to see this movie just to see how bad it is.
