Dragonball: Evolution (2009)

Tagline: Master your destiny.

Curiosity: It was free.

Plot: Goku (Justin Chatwin) is your typical white boy (wait, what?). He’s totally awesome at martial arts, but he can’t use ’em ’cause he might hurt one of the teens at his high school. He harbors a crush on Chi Chi (Jamie Chung), but he can’t tell her! Bummer! But then one day this green guy named Piccolo (Jamers Marsters! Swoon!) and kills his Asian grandfather Gohan (Randall Duk Kim, in a role that can only be described as very 3 Ninjas). Piccolo is trying to collect all seven dragonballs. If he does, he can summon a dragon to grant him a wish, presumably one of the douchey variety. It’s up to Goku and the friends he makes along the way to stop Piccolo. With fists!

Thoughts: In another life, I worked for a weekly newspaper based out of Mount Airy called Peoples XPress. It was a terrible, terrible paper, but at least I got to work with my friends Nate and Sam Fran. Nate reviewed Dragonball when it hit theaters and noted that it hit that awful mid-range of being too bad to be good, but too boring to be good in a bad way. He was right.

Evolution feels tailor-made to piss off fans of Dragonball and Dragonball Z, getting just about everything wrong. Whether it’s casting Caucasian actors to play Asian characters, fudging the characters’ histories, or just being fucking terrible in general, it’s unclear who Evolution was intended for. The plot is too underexplained to make sense to non-fans, but too unfaithful to please actual fans. It’s just a parade of insults.

Oddly enough, the scenes that suck the most are the ones that are actually faithful to the source material. Chow Yun-Fat plays Master Roshi with the kind of zeal and ridiculousness inherent in anime characters, but it comes across as overacting. The final fight scene between Goku and Piccolo looks an awful lot like the anime – they grunt and shoot and energy beams and spend forever charging up attacks – but it’s so confusing and awful-looking. It’s staged just like a fight from the show, but it’s still wrong. Evolution sacrifices a lot of material from the manga to make itself more realistic, but it still can’t bridge that gap into plausibility.

Reflection: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.