When a film is adapted from a book, tv series or some other type of source material; it usually turns out to be average. However, there are some films which turn out to be at the good end of the spectrum like Watchmen and Kite Runner, or at the bad end like Message In a Bottle and The Pelican Brief. Dragonball Evolution pretty much hits the bad end and it does it pretty well in that aspect.
Dragonball Evolution is telling us a completely different story to the one we have read and seen by Akira Toriyama. Goku (Justin Chatwin) is training with his Grandpa Gohan (Randall Duk Kim) and is given a four star dragonball for his 18th birthday. Goku is then struggling to fit in at school; being pushed around by bullies and timid when approached by his love interest of Chi Chi (Jamie Chung). He then finds his Grandpa has being killed by Lord Piccolo (James Marsters) and Mai (Eriko Tamura), which sets him on the quest to find all seven dragonballs before the eclipse, or some prophecy of Oozaru will destroy the world. Goku eventually runs into Bulma (Emmy Rossum), Master Roshi (Chow Yun-Fat) and Yamcha (Joon Park) who join the search for the seven dragonballs.
The character development is major flaw for this film. It jumps from one area to the next without giving enough time to build the characters. In other words, it felt like they rushed through the whole thing. and because it strayed away from the source material so much I was like “this is not the dragonball I know and love. What the hell is going on?”. I mean it is all completely messed up. Like, Goku is supposed to be a forest boy with a tail who holds incredible strength but struggles to cope with the real world. Goku is not some high school kid who is bullied by useless humans struggling to stand up for himself. And still in this film, we still struggle to grasp any knowledge of his character entirely, even if Justin's acting ability was well portrayed. The same can be said about the other characters; Bulma doesn't have blue hair and hardly ever screams and yells at Goku or Roshi. Even though she is acting her part of a nerdy geek character from the source, she still does not give us that feel we had from the source. Piccolo, Mai, Roshi, Yamcha and Chi-Chi barely get enough dialogue or airtime for us to begin to understand them fully. The parts where Piccolo is telling Goku of his history and the fight between Mai and Chi- Chi are supposed to be vital key points for the plot, but they end up coming off sloppy, too short and rushed.
Apart from that the music fits well. I would buy the soundtrack for the film as it was very fast paced and fitted each set and incident that our characters are involved in. The composer did a brilliant job putting it together.
There were many other elements that could have been fitted in like Krillin and Tien cameos, a proper Kamehameha wave as the one portrayed in this film was absolute rubbish; it didn't even look anything like the one we see on TV, even adding the proper hair, antennae and anthropomorphic animals, beards, extras would have been better for this film too. And lets not forget the perverted humor of Master Roshi that this film lacked.
The film only runs for 84 minutes and needless to say, it was not long enough to build a proper story. It would have been better off as a 3hr film; like Lord Of The Rings. That way, we would have understood the characters more and had a better idea of the scenes from the film. Then again, maybe if we had Peter Jackson as a director and a different writer, this film would have stayed more true to its source. There has been talk about a sequel but I doubt I would go see it after seeing how this film lowered my expectations and just destroyed Akira's creation in my eyes.
Rating: 1/5 Rubber Chickens (it wouldn't have gotten any stars if it weren't for the music.)
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