Rating: Skip it.
A lot of movies pulled from other bodies of work have scenes that seem trivial. Maybe a conversation in Lord of the Rings doesn’t resonate on film as well as it does in print, maybe there’s a scene in Harry Potter that seems superfluous. Those movies can get away with packing in some unnecessary moments because those series span nine to 12 hours apiece.
Dragonball: Evolution doesn’t even make it to 90 minutes. It has no room at all to dally. Yet, somehow, despite its preciously short length, the greater bulk of the time is chalked up to moments that don’t advance the plot or increase characterization at all. There were even moments where the movie tried to showcase some minor players thereby making them seem less real. The random back-up girl and guy started hitting on each other with lines too stupid for a drunk to try. If the movie had left them well enough alone when they weren’t adding their bit to the plot, they might have seemed like real (albeit undeveloped) characters.
Instead, they became cut-outs, terribly painful to watch and “acting” their way through a bad script. Every time a line in the movie is spoken, it elicits a cringe or chuckle from the audience, depending on just how stupid the character is coming off. This isn’t just about whether or not the lead Justin Chatwin or the hot girl Jamie Chung can act. The cast does include several actors that have acted well previously — James Marsters and Chow Yun-Fat in particular. Despite their pedigrees, the characters they portray are just as terrible as all the others in the movie. There are serious problems with the story, the screenplay, and the directing.
The story leaves lots of questions to be asked: When did it become acceptable to try and kill someone with a tire iron in a high school fight? Why would you waste one wish for anything on saving someone you met five days ago? Why does Piccolo need the dragonballs when his goal is apparently activated automatically by an eclipse? What’s up with a huge underground lava pool where you fight random zombies?
Since it is an action movie and on at least some level it is a martial arts movie, it’s worth mentioning the action. It was good, not great, with no particularly spectacular choreography and no eye-melting effects. The hair was sort of disappointing considering how crazy the hair gets in the comics.
I don’t know the source (Dragonball and Dragonball Z) very well, so maybe the movie was indeed extremely faithful. If it was, then that turns me off of the series. The pervading impression I had was that whoever wrote the movie had a string of things they thought would be cool and then just chucked it all together in a haphazard heap. It’s like a pile of trash someone left out on bulk pick-up day — sure, there may be a not-so-bad piece of something in the mix but, overall, garbage is garbage.
