You don’t need a review to tell you that Dragonball Evolution is a bad movie. You know it at an instinctive level, like you know that fire is hot or that spiders are terrifying.

I went to go see it because I wanted to answer a crucial question: Is it so bad it’s good, or is it just so bad it’s bad?

The story starts off with the inexplicably skinny and caucasian Goku complaining to his grandfather about being an outsider at school and not being able to talk to girls. He soon meets love interest Chichi and impresses her with some kung fu, but before the budding romance can develop, a big green guy named Piccolo kills Goku’s uncle, looking for the titular Dragonball that has the power to grant wishes when combined with the other six balls.

The improbably named Bulma Briefs shows up at Goku’s doorstep looking for her father’s Dragonball, recently stolen by Piccolo. The two team up to find kung fu guru Master Roshi, played by a slumming Chow Yun Fat, and the trio embarks to collect all the Dragonballs.

An action movie doesn’t require much more than paper-thin character development, but Dragonball Evolution doesn’t even have that, really. Piccolo is an evil alien guy, who escaped from captivity… somehow. He’s got a lady who hangs out with him and does his evil bidding, but the movie doesn’t even mention her name

Yamcha shows up and doesn’t really do much. He’s the least necessary character, but it’s around this point that Dragonball Evolution starts to flirt with capturing the spirit of its basis.

Dragonball, as a comic and cartoon, was a series of madcap adventures in a world that didn’t pretend to make sense. It mixed high technology and mysticism, it had talking animals and ridable clouds and robots and whatever else Toriyama felt like throwing into the mix. Goku was a naive enthusiastic goober with a monkey tail who was technically an outsider, but was too happy to care.

As Dragonball Evolution flits through random scenes in the middle, you get a sense of what the movie could have been if they’d just embraced the randomness and gone full-on crazy. It might not have been good, but it would have been memorable.

DBE plays it safe, though. The world isn’t the one we live in, but it’s more futuristic than eccentric. The plot soon returns to Goku’s crush on Chichi, and soon has to get to the final fight with the bad guy, and the movie is over before you know it.

The movie has some good parts. It’s nice to see Ernie Hudson getting work. James Marsters as Piccolo has a very cool villain voice. And, uh… that’s about it. The fight scenes don’t have much to recommend them, filmed in the jump-cut style that obscures what’s actually happening.

That’s the disappointing thing about Dragonball Evolution. It’s barely even bad enough to be memorable. It’s destined to be a footnote on IMDB rather than a cult classic among afictionados of bad movies.

Popularity: 7% [?]