Column:

'Dragonball Evolution' makes absolutely no sense

The movie tries to cram in an entire series.

By Dan Moore

Published April 17, 2009

"Dragonball Evolution" makes no sense on any level, internal or external, like the few movies you will ever have the pleasure of seeing on basic cable. Internally it's a wild, plotless trip through video-game style MacGuffin collection; externally, it's been produced in English for an anime-fan audience that, by and large, prefers "authentic" Japanese, and consumed mainly by a more receptive Japanese audience. The total effect is incomprehensible, but the manic energy that comes with adapting 150 episodes of a TV show in about an hour-and-a-half keeps the movie just this side of terrible.

On the off chance you were never a seventh-grade boy, I'll explain the "Dragonball" story. In a world where everyone has funny names, an orphan child named Goku and a girl named Bulma meet each other and discover they are both looking for the seven Dragon Balls, magical artifacts with great powers. In the process they save the world, typically several times, and engage in extraordinarily long battle sequences. This takes place over a long period of time; the natural assumption in adapting it would be to select one particular adventure from the series -- one Dragon Ball, maybe the first time Goku and Bulma meet -- and focus on it.

But "Dragonball Evolution" makes no concessions to our natural assumptions. The screenplay, like bad fan fiction, attempts to cram every last plot point into one movie, and as a result can't sufficiently develop any of them. Screenwriter Ben Ramsey seems to have been unable to grasp that this is a movie, not a role-playing game -- there's no time to go traipsing across an ill-defined countryside for seven identical Dragon Balls in a movie, and each disjointed episode of the film flashes on-screen and is immediately replaced by another. Seven Dragon Balls, 84 minutes; the math is not in the film's favor.

The structure of the screenplay is only the beginning of the confusion. Goku, a young boy in the source material, is a remarkably old-looking (star Justin Chatwin is 27) high schooler here, going to a more or less normal looking urban high school during the day and seemingly driving onto the set of another movie at night, to train in the countryside with his adoptive martial arts-master grandfather.

The characters and their weird names and personalities have been dropped unaware into a different movie -- Goku and love interest Chi-Chi inexplicably go to school with people named Fuller and Moreno. Considering the inanity of the dialogue and the quick dismissal of the high school plot, the movie would have played better with kids in the roles, but this is not a movie to be reasoned with. Even in live-action everyone still talks like a voice actor, in an embarrassingly over-modulated radio-cool voice.

With no more than five minutes to a plot point this adaptation was doomed for the start -- it's a sad end for one of Japan's most revered properties, which in talented hands could have turned into a Spielberg-lite adventure caper, but here subsists only on the relentless speed at which it moves from inanity to inanity.