There are some films that come along once in a lifetime. Films that make you ask, with 100% seriousness, "what the hell were they thinking?" You may be surprised to know that this question does have an answer of sorts. As Garson Kanin once said, "The problem with film as an art, is that it’s a business." 20th Century Fox had the live-action rights to the Dragon Ball franchise and there was money to be made. Several drafts and $30 million dollars later, Dragonball Evolution was unleashed on defenseless cinemas worldwide, just barely making its money back. As Garson Kanin also said, "the problem with film as a business is that it’s an art." Dragonball Evolution is a lot of things (bland, cheap, uninspired, lazy, insulting, boring, and terrible are words which come to mind), but "art" is not one of them.
The plot is a veritable smörgåsbord of the most cost-effective plot points and details from the classic Dragon Ball manga thrown together with the most derivative teen movie clichés imaginable. Goku (Justin Chatwin) is a teenage loser with an Edward Cullen hairdo and one doozy of a forehead vein. He lives with his grandpa Gohan (Randall Duk Kim) in Japan/China/Mexico/California and has to deal with your average high school problems; bullies, girls, and defending ancient artifacts from alien demons who were sealed away in the center of the Earth by Ernie Hudson 2,000 years ago. Somehow, the evil Lord Piccolo (James Marsters) escapes his Mafuba prison and sets out to gather the seven Dragon Balls; when assembled, they summon an ancient dragon who will grant the user one perfect wish. The task falls to Goku to find the Dragon Balls, stop Piccolo, and most importantly, get the girl. I really can't understand why anyone would try to take "Journey to the West but with dinosaurs and punching" and turn it into a teenage rom-com, but I suppose there was money to be made. So who even cares what it's about, right?
I seriously can't overstate how stupid everything in this movie looks, sounds, and acts. Casting scrawny little Justin Chatwin as a character who once trained comfortably under 100 times Earth's gravity is just an all-around bad idea. Why not get an actual martial artist? Someone who actually LOOKS the part of the strongest fighter on the planet? But then I suppose that wouldn't work in a high school setting, which is really the core problem with this movie. Contrary to popular belief, you COULD do a Dragon Ball movie well if you wanted to. The only requirements are a reverence for the source material and a massive budget. This film had neither.
Characters like Pilaf, Oolong, Turtle, and Puar are completely absent; the closest things we get to any kind of creature effects are Marsters as Piccolo, a split second of the mystical dragon, and a brief but laughable appearance from Ōzaru, the great ape (and some nameless disposable Power Rangers henchmen who I literally only just remembered were in the movie). Why were the bombastic ki attacks reduced to nothing more than gentle farts of wind and light? Why were iconic characters like Krillin and Kami dropped in favor of Carey Fuller and Hildenbrand, the generic high school bullies? Probably the same reason why a large amount of this film was shot in an abandoned Mexican jeans factory; the budget just wasn't there. When it comes to Hollywood adaptations, the "do it right or don't do it at all" philosophy generally doesn't apply. This was the same era that gave us Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (two films which were, coincidentally, also distributed by 20th Century Fox). If there's a popular franchise prime for milking, you can bet a studio will try to collect.
I really tried to find something positive here, even ironically so. It's harder than even I expected, and I love trash like this. Justin Chatwin gives one of the worst performances I've ever seen; I mean he's bad in this. This is the film that basically killed his career, and while there's a chance it was just incompetent direction paired with a godawful script, I'm still not sure anything of value was lost. Emmy Rossum tries very hard to be a confident femme fatale, despite looking like a cyberpunk Topanga Lawrence. Jaimie Chung may as well have not been in the film for all the impression she left and Chow Yun Fat just makes me sad. He plays the part of Master Roshi, and while I appreciate that they retained his character's fondness for swimsuit magazines, he still gives an awkward, half-baked performance, mumbling out vaguely Eastern platitudes about ki and balance and energy.
Joon Park shows up as Yamcha and is so terrible he might just be amazing. His bad is transcendental, which is actually a pretty apt description of Yamcha himself. James Marsters was also a passible enough Piccolo, I suppose. He doesn't really have much to do, but I get the impression that Marsters was fully aware of how silly he looked in his green make-up and plastic muscle chest. It feels like he's just having fun playing Darth Badguy, so that makes his scenes somewhat more bearable than everything else. He also sounds close enough to Chris Sabat while yelling, so that's something.
I feel like complaining about this movie for being an American remake of a Japanese property is the low-hanging fruit of criticism; there's so much actual, authentic bad here that can be picked apart and scrutinized. The performances, the sets, the special effects, the dialog, the way the actors say the dialog, the long, awkward pauses taken in between each line of dialog; this entire movie feels like a bonafide hatchet job. Like it was a Producers-esque scheme to make a quick buck, quality be damned. When we look at movies like Fant4stic, it's clear that studios (especially 20th Century Fox) aren't above such practices, so the real question becomes less "why would they make this" and more "why would anyone agree to be in this insurance scam of a movie"? It's like buying real-estate in the arson district, it just doesn't make sense unless someone is feeling especially desperate. Having finally sat through Dragonball Evolution, I can say that, objectively, no one should ever feel this desperate.
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