Theatrical Review: “Dragonball” De”Evolution”

Drew’s thoughts on this film before seeing it: It honestly can’t be that bad. Super-hero movies have come a long way in twenty years and I can’t possibly imagine that there’d be anything worse the old Hong Kong version of Dragonball that was made as Dragonball was storming into China. I did an excellent job of avoiding any press related material, mostly for my own mental well being, then for the purpose of this article, once Chow Yun-fat was announced as a part of the project. Since I’m not a media whore, it is incredibly easy to do. I wanted to walk into the theater expecting only my most initial reaction to hearing the film actually being made. I don’t expect this to be great but I am still opened to be pleasantly surprised. Hell, Michael Bay’s Transformers, while starkly different than the Robots In Disguise that I knew and loved, even wasn’t all that too terribly bad.

Drew’s thoughts on this film after seeing it: OH GOD WHY FUCK WHY!?!?!

Like a lot of anime fans my age, exposure to Dragonball Z was pivotal to my early days of anime fandom. While I am no Mike LaBrie by any means, the Dragonball anime trilogy was one of the first series that I followed heavily in the dark fansub circles and early Internet editing criticism sites. I am intimately acquainted with the series in both its Japanese and American English versions. That’s part of the reason why I was asked to write this guest review; the other part of it was that I think I am the only writer that could be convinced give the idea a second thought enough that would rope me into the theater. I made the editor pay (business expense!) because I’d be damned that I put any of my money into it; it was too risky that this would turn into a crap-fest. If it wound up to be good, I’d try to convince others to go and probably buy the DVD when it came out; if it wound up bad, I have great fodder for a review. Unfortunately, this review is like a survivor retelling the tale of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Oh, and if you’re one of those “NO SPOILERS” people, the film is in your local theater – go watch it! Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Judging by the fact that you’re reading this, you’ve either seen the film (I’m sorry) or you’ve manned-up and realized the world doesn’t revolve around you. Congratulations!

After a brief prologue and the opening credits,  the film opens with a teenage Son Goku (Justin Chatwin) training with his grandfather, Gohan (some Asian guy with a soul patch named Randall Duk Kim), working some wire-magic. Goku, being a sniveling teenager obsessed with girls and trying not to get his ass-kicked at school. Gohan reiterates that he’s made Goku promise not to use his training for fighting at school and, that since it is his birthday, he has a present for Goku: Suushinchuu, the four-star Dragon Ball and he then explains that when all seven Dragon Balls are brought together, Sheng Long can be summoned and will grant a perfect wish. At school the next day, Goku manages to impress the school’s Number One Popular Girl when she’s not with her Jerk Boyfriend, Chichi (Jamie Chung) and gets invited to her house (which is a fucking castle that’s not on fire) for a Typical High School Party. Goku shows up and Jerk Boyfriend’s Posse tries to beat Goku up while Goku merely uses his skills to evade his ass from being beaten. With the Jerk Boyfriend and his Posse effectively dispatched, Goku then goes to try and make THE MOVES on Chichi. He gets a Goku-sense that something isn’t right with his grandfather and has to return home.

He’s right, apparently, Piccolo (James Marsters) and his fucking airship has escaped the Mafuba and is out to gather the Dragon Balls to wish to be King of the World or something. At least, it was something like that in the comic and I don’t recall them explaining it, so we’ll go with that. Sensing that Suushinchuu was near, he found Gohan who had trained with one of the ancient sages who had sealed him away in the Mafuba; Piccolo then decided that since his assistant Mai (Eriko Tamura) an him can’t find the ball, to get rid of Gohan like he was a witch in a L. Frank Baum novel. Goku arrives just as Gohan is about to die and Gohan babbles on about how Goku has to protect the Dragon Ball from Piccolo and find a man named Master Roshi in Paozu. The next morning, after burying his grandfather, Goku returns home to go through the house to find any references to Roshi, packs up his gradfather’s old dougi and a would-be burglar draws a gun on him. It turns out that the would-be thief is Bulma Briefs (Emmy Rossum) and she has a contraption to hunt down other Dragon Balls and that she is looking for the five star ball, which was stolen from her father days earlier. Goku, with nothing left, offers to help Bulma find the balls and allow her to request the wish if she’ll take him to Paozu to find “Master Roshi”.

They go to Paozu where they eventually find Roshi (Chow Yun-fat) and set out to find the rest of the balls, also picking up Yamcha, the Desert Bandit (the AZN guy, Joong Park). This little band of adventuring is interrupted once by Chichi’s appearance (her secret is that she’s a martial arts tournament fighter) and then again for the climactic fight between Goku and Piccolo. And, that phrase of “climactic fight between Goku and Piccolo” is about as climactic as the fight gets.

This film does do some things right – the wire-guided fight scenes are films homage to Chinese design and contribution just as the comic uses Journey to the West as a very loose foundation and Chinese is used as a predominant cultural influence throughout the first third of the comic. While names and characterizations are similar throughout the film, names of places are familiar and tender nods to the original work are made (such as Chichi’s non-burning castle). However, that’s about where all of the similarities and “what the film does right” all end.

The Dragon World us older fans know and love, complete with landscapes inspired by ancient Chinese and Japanese paintings, what-was modern Japan and isolated, desolate areas where battles could rage for days without collateral damage has all been replaced by a twist between Southern California and Blade Runner. It seems that producers thought that audiences might relate to someone who was the loser teenager in high school and these pseudo-modern settings than perhaps just trying to sell a straight-up fantasy action flick. I’d probably have to ask that guy in the theater who wore a Goku-inspired tunic (I think it actually had the “Ma” kanji from daimaou on it, indicating that he was supposed to be Son Gohan, ca. Age 5.); this person, proving yet again why anime fans get so much flack from the other nerds and “normals” and probably fucking deserve it. Fortunately, that jackass was the only one we saw in our theater like that.

Some might say that Dragonball is just one of those anime that does not transfers well to live action, and that is very much a part of the case, but even an anime that does not transfer to live action well can wind up with hillarious side effects that can make a film enjoyable. Dragonball Evolution doesn’t even have that. It is a film that’s so bad, it’s just enfuriating to watch. And I guess what, as one of those older-schooled Dragonball fans, sucks the most is that this is yet another American version that manages to shit all over the original, intentional or not. Fans like me should probably give up on seeing anything close to a decent adaptation of Dragonball, outside of maybe the manga. Not that Dragonball is some measure of supreme artistic genius or anything like that – it’s an entertaining cartoon about people mostly beating each other senseless and the lead up to those beatings. Evolution just feels plastic and manufactured;  even if this film weren’t attached to a Dragonball name, it would still have a stiff, hard-plastic feel about it and just otherwise be a horrible film that isn’t worth the first or second watch.