The Funcooker

Dragonball Evolution FTL

There was a time when Dragonball would have been great to see on the big screen in a live action adaptation, but that time has passed and yet a movie was produced some years too late.

I was really skeptical about the movie after seeing some screen shots and the cast line-up but I was able to set it aside after seeing one of the first trailers. That was short lived once I saw the trailers showing closer to the movie release date. As a long time fan, I thought it would be proper to pay homage to the series by watching this movie even though I’t been getting terrible reviews. Speed Racer wasn’t getting too many good reviews but I love the live action adaptation so I thought maybe something good might come from DBE. I’m going to try and give a fair and un-biased review of the movie in my perspective but it might be hard as I am a fan of the animated series. I’m going to do my best to review it as a movie and please read at your own risk as there may be SPOILERS AHEAD.

I’ll start off with the overall story. There were one too many loopholes and it felt like a lot of things were left out. I can’t blame them though, the series is pretty long to fit into one movie but I couldn’t figure out if the movie was an adaptation of the whole Dragonball series or a section. From what I’ve read, this was supposed to be based on the first Dragonball series which includes the Red Ribbon Army but the main antagonist in this movie was Piccolo which was a whole saga in itself. In DBE, Oozaru (The monkey form Goku’s alien race turns into) was controlled by Piccolo 1000 years before this story takes place but who knows where that Oozaru came from before Goku came into the picture. The scene changes were too sudden and some of the jump cuts were really bad. In the end, the story felt a bit clumsy. I read somewhere online that the script for the 2^nd movie was finished but I think a polished first movie is due beforehand.

The characters didn’t help move the movie along. I can understand not making the characters look like their 2D counterparts but at least keep the personalities. Whether a little boy or an adult, Goku is naïve yet strong minded. He’ll take on any challenge without hesitation and concentrated on his training, but not this Goku. He was more of a whiny teen who would rather get the girl but I guess there had to be some plot device that leads to Grandpa Gohan’s death. Speaking of which, there was no feeling from the actors. The sad parts weren’t sad, happy parts were really cut short. It was hard to get a beat on what to feel in certain scenes. Yamcha reminded me of Ashton Kutcher’s character in That 70’s Show. Mai was really quiet and probably could have been left out. Piccolo wasn’t as threatening as he should have been being the main antagonist. Chi-Chi was ok but her martial art’s movements were a bit goofy. Bulma was probably the closest to the original character’s personality. Master Roshi should’ve been played by someone else though it was funny seeing Chow Yun Fat being goofy and sporting a shirt with a sexy anime girl printed on the front. I would’ve rather seen James Hong play the part of Roshi. Grandpa Gohan looked a little out of place but if everyone’s acting matched his performance, it might have made the movie a little more interesting. The Summoning of Shen Long was very weak. Not only was Goku’s beckoning of the dragon weedy, so was the dragon itself. Instead of some big intimidating dragon showing up in an epic fashion, we get a puny shiny smoky dragon show up for less than a minute to do its thing and just fly back into the little portal it came out of.

Dragonball was originally based on a Chinese story so I don’t know where a lot of reviews and comments flaming the movie because Goku wasn’t Japanese or some kind of Asian. That’s just ridiculous since he’s actually alien. There were some comforting things that came from this movie. At first it thought it was funny when they pronounced the flow of energy known as ‘chi’ as ‘key’ but then I looked it up and it is really pronounced as ‘ki’. Goku’s transformation into Oozaru wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. At least he was ape looking. The Dragonballs looked pretty cool. It was a nice touch to have the stars floating around in the ball. Master Roshi’s house was located in the middle of what looked like a giant lake. High tech buildings lined the outer ring of the lake whereas Roshi’s house looked like a plain old school apartment building on a little ‘island’. Kind of like his house in the anime but instead it’s a little house on an island in the middle of the ocean. That was a nice tiny reference.

As a fan of the series I was pretty disappointed with the lack of character in DBE. The story fell short but as I said earlier, it’s hard to fit a whole series into one movie. The fight scenes were a bit clunky and really short. They kind of remind me of the fights in Kung Fu Hustle but not as good. The final fight and the Kamehameha resembled the choreography and special effects of a foreign movie called Legend of Zu. As a movie by itself, it was pretty inept. You couldn’t really connect with the characters and I think this movie tried to take itself seriously but ended up being a bad kind of cheesy. Yes, there is a good type of cheesy and that’s where the movie was entertaining which this movie wasn’t.