Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
7/30/08
I've always thought (only
half-jokingly) that the solution to our problems in a lot of foreign lands
involves carpet-bombing those countries with DVDs. Call it decadent
or materialistic all you want, but our pop culture embraces individuality
and happiness in a world where too many people are afforded neither by
the accident of where they were born. A very interesting story on
that subject is half-obscured behind summer movie machinery in Brian Robbins'
new Eddie Murphy vehicle Meet Dave. While containing more
than its' share of childishly coarse humor and indifferent performances
(though not from Murphy, who's very good), it also packs some big laughs
and fleeting but real flashes of what could have been one hell of a sci-fi
comedy.
Near the Statue of Liberty,
a fireball blasts through the atmosphere and crash-lands face-first.
It then stands, dusts itself off, and walks away. What appears to
be a person (Eddie Murphy) is in fact a spaceship, sent from the planet
Nil with a tiny crew inside to locate a device previously sent to the planet
to scout for water. Once acquired, that golf ball-sized object need
only be dropped into the harbor and it will suck all the salt from Earth's
oceans, solving Nil's energy crisis. Inside the ship, we meet its'
harsh, emotionless crew, led by The Captain (Murphy again, apparently the
ship was modeled after him), who directs the ship's actions from his platform
in front of a central viewscreen. But an entire crew manning his
various joints needs to carry out those commands, and there's a fairly
severe learning curve to steering a body from the inside. During
that learning process, he's hit by a car driven by widow Gina Morrison
(Elizabeth Banks), an artist who assumes his strange behavior was caused
by the trauma of the crash. Hoping to avoid a lawsuit, she invites
him to dinner with her and her son Josh (Austin Lynd Myers). Lo and
behold, when the sea-sucking orb crashed to Earth, it did so right into
Josh's fish tank. So the ship, which identifies itself as “Dave Ming
Cheng” (assembled from a quick Google search of the Earth's most common
names) sticks close to the Morrisons, hoping to get the orb back from a
school bully who snatched it. In the process, having anyone to talk
to helps to bring Gina and Josh back to life, while the interaction with
our world starts to bring out the suppressed feelings of the Nillians.
Well, not all of them: if The Captain will not follow through with
the mission to destroy Earth to save Nil, his hateful first officer No.
2 (Ed Helms) will be happy to do it for him.
Meet Dave (why the
studio abandoned the far better original title Starship Dave is
a mystery) is built to be a crowd-pleaser, even if its' structural sensibilities
harken more closely to those of Murphy's first round of hits back in the
mid-80's than a modern blockbuster. And the story of the people of
Nil, their bizarre human spaceship and the choices they face between individuality
and group and self-interest and heroism is actually pretty rousing.
If only the movie took that story more seriously, rather than as an excuse
to transform the crew into a collection of Hip-Hop stereotypes. I
could imagine a run at this story with more actors and fewer comedians
in the supporting roles and more art and emotion and less dancing that
could have been great. But the plot, with its' third act full of
sound and fury, still moves fast enough and knows how to hit its' high
notes, and the lead performances by Murphy and Union are strong enough
to seal the deal.
The best part of Meet
Dave is Dave itself, a wonderfully cleaver creation brilliantly executed
by Murphy, an actor who's spent the bulk of his career transforming himself
physically. It's not easy “steering” a human body one joint at a
time, and once the crew has licked simple things like walking and smiling
(early failures on that front are hilarious), there's still hard stuff
like putting on a shirt (a showstopper). And that doesn't even consider
the necessary social skills. It's not actually a good idea to imitate
EVERYTHING someone else does while talking to them, and the best advice
the Captain gets about Earth customs comes from No. 3's relentless searching
of Google, whose #1 search result is always taken as the Gospel by the
Nillians (no wonder they're alarmed when Gina says she'll be serving Meat
Loaf for dinner). Murphy's ever-improving mastery of his own body
and expressions is a wonder to behold, and his performance as The Captain
is the movie's best, complete with an amusingly spot-on British accent
and a pretty good emotional arc. Union is perhaps a tad too emotional
when the movie begins, but she and Murphy have solid chemistry and she
makes an effective Voice of Reason.
Alas, when given the choice
between the high road and the low road, director Brian Robbins and writers
Rob Greenberg & Bill Corbett have the switch stuck on “LOW”.
No bodily function goes unreplicated by the ship, with special emphasis
on anything that's the responsibility of the both aptly and horribly named
Lieutenant Buttocks (David Goldsmith). Kevin Hart, so funny in this
capacity in Superhero Movie, is a mixed
bag at best as No. 17, who gets some laughs suffering the indignities of
manning Dave's mouth, but doesn't wait until the Nillian Cultural Awakening
to be the movie's Wacky Black Guy, thus being gratingly out of character
from the word “Go”.
I absolutely adore, Elizabeth
Banks, and she does everything she can with Gina, which is to say she makes
it out of the movie alive. As funny as Dave is, that just makes it
all the harder to believe anyone could think for even a moment that he
was anything but a certifiable weirdo. That plays well in the early
scenes between the two of them, but once Gina stops seeming to notice how
strange he is, she becomes kinda certifiable herself. And Dave's
ET-like relationship with Josh is harmless but eats up screen time without
generating much interest. Scott Caan keeps his head above water as
a Fox Mulder-like cop obsessed with aliens, but its' not a terribly convincing
role.
Meet Dave has one
of the more peculiar PG-ratings I've seen the MPAA hand out: kids
will no doubt love that “bawdy humor”, but parents likely to be embarrassed
to be sitting next to them while Dave takes emergency measures to eject
all those hot dogs he just ate should keep in mind that it feels much more
like a PG-13 to me. The movie can't help but irk me a bit about how
much of the promise in its' really relevant Culture War story is squandered,
but it's an entertaining old school Summer movie that should please Eddie
Murphy's fans. But I'll probably pick a better-executed movie to
air lift into North Korea and Iran... |
