Description
Like many popular franchises, Hollywood somehow manages to get it's grubby hands on another popular series and what we get is another horrible confused mess. Dragonball Evolution is Hollywood's next victim.
My first problem is with the actual movie title. Why Evolution? Why couldn't it have just been called Dragonball? The fact that this first movie has got a subtitle suggests it's a sequel, but it's obviously not. I guess it would have made too much sense to call it Dragonball!
Now that I've got that out the way...The story sees young martial arts whiz Goku begin a journey to find the mysteriousmore… and powerful dragonballs before the maniacal Namek Piccollo can get to them. Once all 7 have been collected, a dragon is summoned that will grant one perfect wish. If you are familiar with Akira Toriyama's manga and anime versions of this then this you will know that this is the basic underlying premise for the series. However, it is is the main premise for the movie.
Overall this is one disappointing movie, it's not even so bad that it's funny, it's just plain bad. Why they hired Justin Chatwin is a mystery to me. Surely they should have gone for a bigger guy, more muscular guy seeing as Goku is meant to be the most powerful warrior in the universe. Chatwin's small frame and wooden acting makes it evident that he was a bad choice for the role. James Marster's as Piccolo isn't too bad but we hardly get to see him in the movie. And when we do, he's either talking about the dragonballs or out finding the dragonballs. Certain cliches in this movie remind me of the new Sam Raimi Spiderman movies, with Goku being an underdog who is picked on in school, a bit like peter parker. However, unlike the awesome Spiderman movies, Dragonball falls short in the fact that there is no chemistry between any of the characters, and Piccolo seems like a 100% baddie bad guy which is frankly quite boring. If you think back to Spiderman, the villains were interesting and each had motives and a personality, which often created morally grey villains that were entertaining, memorable and more importantly - believable. This should have been the same with Piccolo as he is a classic character of Japanese pop culture. Yet this pitiful effort of bringing him to life on the big screen is one of the main reasons this movie fails. And OMG Yamcha...his actor takes BAD acting to the next level...WOW!
Action scenes were okay but I felt like I'd seen it all before. There wern't really any instances where I felt impressed or shocked by any of the action scenes. Although I did feel a twinge of happiness with the final showdown wich includes the auras and special moves from the series which are actually recreated nicely for this live action outing. That, to me was the highlight of the movie.
You may think that I am slightly biased as I am a fan of the series however, I saw this movie with an open mind and put myself in the shoes of newbie to the franchise. However, this didn't alter my opinion. The movie is very cliched and very shallow. The movie feels extremely hollow with very little substance behind the characters. Like I said before, the basic premise of the dragon ball series was a base for the characters, plot and action; but unfortunately the movie could not pull off any of these three successfully, therefore resulting in a boring movie.Whereas the series triumphed, this movie will soon be forgotten and will sink in to the back of our memories with the many other below average anime/game movie conversions. Apparantly, Dragonball is planned to be a trilogy of movies, but after watching this one, I wont be as eager to watch the sequels. Overall, this movie is disapointing if you are a fan but more importantly it is a bad movie in general which should have, and could have been so much better.
| Justin Chatwin |
| Chow Yun-Fat |
| Jamie Chung |
| Emmy Rossum |
| James Marsters |
Info:
- Category:
- Movies > Films
- Case Type:
- DVD
- Release Type:
- Custom
- Language:
- English
- Region:
- R1
- Comments:
- 1 read add
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Cover Info:
- Title:
- Dragonball Evolution (2004) R1 Custom DVD
- Part:
- CD
- Dimensions:
- 1400 x 1400 px
- Size:
- 381 KB
- Downloads:
- 901 (0 today)
- Uploaded:
- 14/05/09 by rusho
- Quality Rating:
-
- Currently 5/5 Stars.
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