Dragonball: Evolution

Hollywood plundering Japanese pop culture isn't something new. From "Americanizing" television series for the kids from Power Rangers to Ultraman, and adapting famed characters from Japanese film, games and manga to frequent disastrous effect, it still wouldn't stop the studios from going after one property after another. This time round it's the long running Dragonball series, because the assumption is that the built-in fan base would translate to instant dollars at the box office. Not.

You have to give the filmmakers a little bit of credit though, being either foolhardy, or just plain ballsy. It's a given that they cannot condense and distill the rich content into a surprisingly less than 90 minute movie, and live in the hopes of producing a sequel, or to generate a franchise (i.e. don't leave the cinema hall when the end credits start to roll). But what they successfully do, is to super-summarize the entire mythos by throwing out everything except the main gist of the entire manga, making it extremely simplistic in poor lazy-man standards in adaptation.

For the uninitiated, the film would serve as a quick launchpad to the original manga. For those with a wee bit of knowledge of what it's about (like myself), the film just treads along the same lines and doesn't offer you new information. For the fanboys, I guess you'll only get some kicks at seeing some of your favorite characters come alive, only that they look more Caucasian, and have a head full of hair when they're not supposed to (someone forgot to insist that in the contract?) That's all you're gonna get. Period.

As far as film-making and story-telling techniques go, you can see cliché after cliché being thrown at you, with the poorly and cheaply rendered special effects offering no consolation. Justin Chatwin's Goku is your typical teenager who possesses innate potential yet to be realized, and in his frustration he gets treated by peers as a loser geek. He lives with his grandpa Gohan (Randall Duk Kim in stereotypical know-it-all like in Kung Pu Panda), and develops a crush on school hottie Chi Chi (Jamie Chung). Goku's calling in life is to prevent an apocalypse from happening with the return of chief cardboard baddie Lord Piccolo (an instant shoo-in as one of the worst cinematic villains, ever!) and his temporary sidekick Mai (Eriko Tamura) who attempt to collect 7 dragonballs to fulfill an ancient myth. And of course Goku needs a Fellowship, in the form of irritating tech-wizard Bulma (Emmy Rossum last seen in the sinker Poseidon), mercenary Yum Cha (Joon Park who probably copied Rain's uninspiring cinematic turn in Speed Racer to a T) and Chow Yun-Fat the biggest name of them all here trying his darnest best to act cute as Master Roshi, who imparts skills in double quick time to Goku.

Speaking of time, or the lack thereof, everything is compressed. From two weeks to two days and the day of the blood moon shielding the yellow sun (OK so I made that up), everything moves at so fast a pace, that all you get are cheesy lines of dialog, and an excuse to paste some action sequences together. And James Wong certainly can't direct action (despite being at the helm of Jet Li's The One, which was of course bland and bad), opting to pay homage to Zack Snyder's slow-mo technique, and midway changing the style to having the camera being too close to the action, in the dark, coupled with quick MTV cuts that you don't get to see a thing.

And the rush job just doesn't stop at the narrative or the action. Special effects wise, they look really cheap, and I wonder whether Producer Stephen Chow would roll his eyes at what would be extremely pale when put side by side with his Kung Fu Hustle done many years ago. Ayumi Hamasaki's contribution of the theme song Rule sounded really bad as well (I may get flak from her fans), and I guess having some Asian participation doesn't legitimize what is essentially a poorly done movie. Not even Chow Yun-Fat's star status could save this, and you wonder what figured when this is the movie that he gave up Red Cliff for.

This is basically a movie that only children below the age of 5 will enjoy tremendously, despite having to see 6 half-balls, contributed courtesy of the 3 lead female characters, being continuously flashed on screen, thanks to some neck plunging wardrobe (where's that malfunction when you need one?) Totally bland and really uninteresting, I would suggest sticking to the manga instead.

What is wrong with this picture man? Nothing personal to James as a director. I love his Final Destination series, but I think James is NOT the right person to direct this million plus dollars franchise. Why James is hired to direct this movie in the first place? It is a big mistakes. Like having Ang Lee directing the Hulk. Hiring an Asian to direct an Asian animation epic doesn't mean the movie will turn out great. The director must have a vision of the given materials.

The entire outcome is a disaster and disappointment. It is understandable that the film isn't exactly the same as the original comic, but the characters and the plot just suck as a film on its own. From observing the promotion materials of Dragonball, it seems that Fox doesn't want to do this movie at all. The posters suck and the trailers suck. The studio spends a lot of money on making Marvels and DC comics into movies, look how successful those films had become. The studios should pay more respect and faith in Asian materials.

To me this whole thing isn't making any sense at all because there are established fans across the globe, and Dragonball comic and cartoon itself has last more than TWO decades. This is why I think 20th Century Fox was putting money into this project initially. Everyone is looking forward to see a Hollywood version of Dragonball. Soon as I saw the first teaser, I knew I shouldn't put up in any hope into this movie. Even though I went to see the movie without any expectation, the movie still suck! Despite the led down of the Dragonball fans, it creates negative impulses to those who is new to Dragonball.

Dragonball is a hot cult in Asia and it hits the western market because of the stylistic action and fight sequences. However, the martial arts choreography in this movie is another led down. Not to mention the screenplay, the production design of this film is not consistence at all. Wardrobes, props to makeup, nothing fits together! Not only nothing in this film resembles the original DB, it is a disgrace. No wonder they use the word "Evolution". But when they say evolution, I don't expect the studio turns something respectable like Dragonball into rubbish. I've seen a live action version of Dragonball shot by the Malaysian years ago. Although it is an exact duplicate of the animation. But the movie is far better than Dragonball Evolution.

A lot of us are looking for a remake of this movie.

This is a total butchering of what I had held great hopes of seeing. The movies attempts to follow the dragon ball story line, meanwhile adding a "modern" spin on it (ie. chi chi's castle, and Master Roshi lives in a regular semi whats up with that?). What the viewers want to see is a storyline that follows the cartoon series without any changes, and additions. Overall, the plot is weak, the characters do not look like the cartoons (ie. Yamcha, Master Roshi), the 2D cartoon series had better special effects than the movie (and the series had NO special effects, thats how terrible it was). I created an IMDb account JUST to comment on how they butchered Dragonball for me and I hope that Hollywood is smarter next time as to when they bring such a strong fan based series onto the big screens or they will only infuriate more of the audience.

As bad as Inspector Gadget and The Last Airbender are, they look like masterpieces compared to Dragonball Evolution. The TV series was very, very good, the movie was half-baked and bland. The only good thing was James Marsters, while he mayn't look exactly like Piccolo he at least tries to capture the essence of the character. Just a shame he isn't in enough of the movie to elevate it even more.

Why do I say that Dragonball Evolution is a contender for the worst live-action film for an animated TV series? The scenery and costumes are nice to look at, but the cinematography does nothing for me, the editing is shoddy and the lighting is dull. The special effects don't impress either, they do distract rather than enhance and it doesn't help that some of them are half-baked.

The film is also too rushed, and in all honesty I was left bored by the end, nothing really interesting in my view happens. The story is juvenile and predictable, the dialogue is terrible either being cheesy or due to the delivery very rarely ringing true and the direction is bland. The acting is nothing to smile about, Goku and Yamuka especially are complete disasters and show a complete lack of acting ability. Not only that, the characters here are treated in the most banal way possible and are difficult to like as a result.

Overall, a very poor movie. 1/10 Bethany Cox

Let me just start off by saying that there are no redeeming qualities to this movie at all. The multi-million dollar budget has amounted to a teen drama mixed with power rangers. The final product is insulting, to say the least.

The creators of this horrible, horrible adaption should take a good long think about what they have done and why they should have just followed the source material instead of taken it for granted. Do they really think that the entire Dragonball fan-base is this stupid? Akira Toriyama probably has a noose around his neck right about now.

To finish this off: The acting is atrocious, the butt-rock scattered through the soundtrack will make you want to punch the guy running the theater in the face, and the story is basically the manga's, but cut up, put into a blender, stuffed into sausage skins, and stitched back together with an American flag tied around it.

If you want your Dragonball fix, just buy dvds of the show instead, skip the movie, and if you don't skip it, then at least don't pay for this thing. I heard that a sequel is already in the works, and we don't need a trilogy, that would be three of these movies too many.