Film: Dragonball Evolution
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox
Directed by: James Wong
Produced by: James Wong and Stephen Chow
Dragonball Evolution is another live-action anime film adaptation that doesn’t give the fans what they want. This movie is chock full of problems including bad dialogue, poor casting, bad screenplay which is distorted from the source material it’s based on, lame fights, and lame copy of the romance from Spider Man. Add all this together and you get one of the worse movies of 2009 molded together in 89 minutes of boredom.
The first problem is the cast of Dragonball Evolution because the cast barely look like the characters that they are portraying. Goku(Justin Chatwin) is the worse character in the film because he doesn’t have his signature hairstyle, but it would look horrible in live-action and he goes to high school. That’s right people Goku goes to high school. This is a really lame excuse for high school bully Carey Fuller(Texas Battle) to bully Goku because Texas Battle is 27 years old and is too old to play that role. They had a similar problem in Never Back Down with Jake Tyler(Sean Faris) because he was 24 yrs old, besides that problem in NBD it was still good to watch. Later on in the movie a boring story about a the end of the world. I would fall asleep too and then a lame romance occurs between Chi-Chi(Jamie Chung).
Dragonball Evolution then has lame action sequences, decent special effects and a dull plot like Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. The next character wrong for the film is Mai(Eriko Tamura), who is a shape shifter who works for Piccolo(James Marsters). Speaking of Piccolo he doesn’t come close to looking like Piccolo from the anime. Instead he looks like a lame villain from an episode of Stargate. Then, the first meeting with Bulma(Emmy Rossum) is mediocre because she excessively words the Dragon Radar into “Dragonball Energy Locator”. Bulma has the smarts, but doesn’t have the look and same goes for Master Roshi(Chow-Yun-Fat). Roshi is into porn, but he doesn’t have the personality that he had in the anime. Then the crew meet Yamcha(Jo-on Park) who is another wasted charcter in this film because he does nothing and his shyness of women isn't here.
The fights are poor and just lame especially with Mai because she easily defeated several times making her another standard female accomplice for the main villain in the film. Then, the ending is very slapdash like the making of this film and later adding of the subtitle Evolution. Dragonball :The Magic Begins was bad, but a least it was funny at some points. This should be known as Dragonball suckalution after seeing this movie. Even worse there is going to be a movie based fighting game that play like the Budokai series for the PSP when the film releases in the US nationwide on April 10,2009.
Pros- Decent Special Effects and Short length
Cons-Everything else that this movie has to offer
