Unless I'm mistaken, and I really was too lazy to look it up, this week marks the two-year anniversary of this column.
Since then, I've reviewed around 150 movies, had almost two dozen page views, and been arrested four times for public indecency in a theater. In fairness, three of those times were during College — like I told the police, of course my pants fell down, how am I supposed to keep them up when I'm using my belt to hang myself? — but I guess I have no excuse for the fourth one. What can I say, The Dark Knight was really good.
So what's special about the two-year mark? Absolutely nothing. Just like every week, when I get up tomorrow at the crack of 12:30, I'm going to go install myself in a movie seat, nap through whatever's on, then come home and copy/paste the IMDb comments section to my editor, who thinks the Internet is witchcraft (that's why he makes me capitalize it) and thus can't get wise to my game. This is just one more week. Much like my romantic experiences, this anniversary — in this case, Dragonball Evolution — cost $7 and I'll forget it tomorrow.
Justin Chatwin is just like any other teenage boy: he’s awkward around girls, feels weird and different, and spends his days trying to learn to kill things with his externalized ki.
But an ancient power has returned to the world. James Marsters, the marauding alien who was imprisoned beneath the earth 2,000 years ago, has returned to claim the dragonballs which will grant him ultimate power.
His search soon takes the life of Chatwin's grandpa, the man who’d raised him since birth. Alone in the world, Chatwin must now seek his vengeance and get to the dragonballs before Marsters can turn them to evil.
I can’t claim great familiarity with the Dragonball cartoons — it lost me about the dozenth time an episode burned half its length on two characters flying in the air and bellowing at each other — but director James Wong neatly avoids the worst traps of adapting an epic cartoon to the live-action big screen.
Cartoons can get away with being exaggerated, excitable and oversized (industry tip: I've heard this referred to as "cartoonish") because that's what we're used to seeing. After the better part of a century of animated coyotes getting flattened by anvils and boy rabbits corrupting the youth with volcanic sets of falsies, if a cartoon's got a jetpack monkey sidekick or an oafish caveman from the year 10,000, nobody blinks an eye.
But direct translations of those things to live-action is murder on a movie (see Racer, Speed). While Wong eventually builds up to the enormous soul-karate beatdowns, his first fight scenes are much more grounded in reality. Energetic and lightly comic, they're cartoonish without being distracting.
Ben Ramsey's script takes the same tack, tossing off a few offhand jokes without ever descending into the anime-prevalent "comic relief" that makes you want to earn a doctorate in assassination and one by one eliminate everyone who had anything to do with those awful, awful jokes. Likewise, the dialogue borders on the cheesy without ever crossing into never-never land.
Dragonball is less successful in holding onto its menagerie of side characters and a mythology that's pretty much just dumped in our laps. Some people are aliens, others are demon-spirits, and others are techno-Batmen; I'm not really sure of the wider significance of any of this, but at least things are moving right along.
Without the people or backstory to really suck you in, Dragonball never finds a way to distinguish itself as anything more than a generic quest movie where some weird shit happens and then people punch each other a lot. It's light enough along the way, but I doubt it'll have much appeal to anyone who isn't already a fan.
Grade: C+