That collective howl of anguish you hear is actually millions of seething anime fans who are demanding a public beheading of all who were involved in ruining their childhood fantasies by completely eviscerating Akira Toriyama’s worldwide manga phenomenon, Dragonball. Dragonball Evolution as directed with extreme blandness by James Wong and scripted with no sense of purpose by Ben Ramsey is a live-action film adaptation that fails to be anything more than a passing diversion for young toddlers.

Anyone with even a sliver of knowledge of Toriyama’s seminal manga is going to be infuriated at how insipid and completely juvenile the narrative has become. To be fair, the source material was never going to be compared to Shakespeare or even something closer to home such as the magnificent work coming out of Studio Ghibli (think 2D Pixar) but at least it offered its fans exciting martial arts combat and a cast of colourful eccentric characters.

In the hands of James Wong both these series assets have gone missing with martial arts routines that really accentuate the fact that no one has any clue what they are doing and characters that are flatter than a pancake in terms of personality. Right from the start the filmmakers stumble out of the gate with the greatly miscast Justin Chatwin playing our hero Goku, a teenage orphan that is raised by his grandfather Gohan (Randall Duk Kim) on their secluded estate. Let’s be straight up and frank here the decision to cast a Caucasian lead as Goku might rub many the wrong way but the problem is not really race but the fact that Chatwin has almost no charisma and is entirely wooden even during the fight sequences. Chatwin’s only bursts of raw emotion come from emo-baby tears and an altogether vein-popping visage of rage that looks more like he’s passing wind. It doesn’t help that the script glosses over his back-story, only giving the audience just enough motivation to propel him forward and though his character hits rough patches we’re never convinced of his emotional struggle as he returns to his cheery self a mere five minutes later.

As presented here, Goku, while still a teenager, is already an accomplished martial artist yet constantly endures bullying at school for being an outsider. Embarrassed and frustrated by his tormentors he dare not fight back due to Gohan’s strict conditions that he should never show his true power. Of course, like any other normal teenager, Goku has a secret crush on Chi Chi, a lovely though completely forgettable lass played by Jamie Chung who also harbors hidden feelings for him.

Just as his school life begins to take a turn for the positive Goku’s world is turned upside down when Gohan is murdered by Piccolo (James Marsters), an evil being who has managed to escape after thousands of years of imprisonment. Piccolo seeks revenge on the world and embarks on a quest to find the seven mystical dragonballs (think glowing orbs) that will grant him ultimate power. Goku deduces what is going on and vows to find the dragonballs before his nemesis with the intention on using them to grant “one perfect wish” and stop Piccolo and his nefarious scheme.

For the main antagonist, Piccolo is not at all menacing as Marsters lurches into a dry drooling delivery. It might have been more effective, albeit wholly cliché, if he just laughed maniacally as it would show some degree of rage. Instead he glares menacingly behind the laughable green makeup that wouldn’t scare a gnat.

In fact, Piccolo is largely wasted content to spend most of the movie firmly entrenched in his flying blimp-like ship waxing poetic about how he’s longed to unleash hell upon the world. All the grunt work is left to his henchwoman, Mai (Eriko Tamura) who at least presents a buxom figure in spandex and gets to mix it up in some of the martial arts sequences.

Along the way Goku hitches up with a spunky inventor named Bulma (Emmy Rossum), Yamcha (Joon Park) a roguish con artist and last but not least Master Roshi (Chow Yun-Fat) a wise sage in the mold of Obi-Wan, except totally perverted and with a penchant for wearing loud Hawaiian shirts. Just writing those last few words is enough to make me laugh trying to picture Chow Yun-Fat as Master Roshi facing off against Darth Vader but enough of that fanboy moment.

Emmy Rossum’s career has certainly taken a turn for the worse here especially after her breakthrough in the movie musical Phantom of the Opera. Her Bulma is just not compelling and most of her dialogue consists of dreaded Star Trek technobabble that tries to sound scientific but ends up being hokey. For what it’s worth, Rossum certainly has Bulma’s look down pat as well as her cocky attitude but that one-dimensional trait isn’t enough to make audiences empathize with her.

About the only thespian that seems to be having a good time is Chow Yun-Fat who decides to throw caution to the wind and revert back to his manic film persona not seen since his early 1980s Hong Kong comedies. While the rest of the cast attempts to play it straight Chow Yun-Fat makes the easy realization that the material is inherently campy thus making the conscious decision to let it all hang out. This is the sign of a veteran actor who is not at all embarrassed at making a giant fool of himself and he injects needed verve and energy whenever he’s on screen. It’s too bad that his character is criminally underused.

For a lean movie that’s less than one and a half hours, Dragonball Evolution to its credit, is never bone-crushingly dull but there’s little coherency as scenes lurch forward without rhyme or reason. Small kids who are watching for the action will not notice but for everyone else the screenplay makes little or no sense with no concept of spatial relation or time passed. Fans of the manga will undoubtedly know that it takes Goku and friends a very long time to track down each successive dragonball but here they all basically fall right into his lap. Scenes are constructed that boggle the mind and stretch believability to ridiculous levels. At one point Goku, Bulma and Master Roshi fall into a giant pit created by Yamcha to blackmail errant travelers into giving him money to save them. After a bit of needless arguing Bulma suddenly realizes using her tracking device that there’s a dragonball nearby. Coincidence or just brainless writing? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

Further along in the story Goku finds himself across a giant crater filled with molten lava with a dragonball located on the other side. He devises a “brilliant” plan of throwing evil mud-like villains into the lava and then proceeding to play hopscotch as he jumps from body to body until he arrives at his goal. The scene reminded me of the end of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith and I wondered at the complete incongruity of anyone surviving the immense heat as they stood next to boiling lava not to mention the fact that those bodies Goku employs to jump on never burn in the least. What works in an anime or manga just looks totally phony on the silver screen.

In fact with no sense of passage of time it certainly feels as if Goku discovers nearly every dragonball in less than twenty minutes giving his quest an altogether empty and listless feel.

Kids might get a kick watching their heroes come to life but this production screams low-budget from the less than exciting visual effects to the laughable Paper Mache rocks and sparse set design the movie resembles a Disney family channel special. Actually, this is not a bad comparison as the film is so sanitized and squeaky clean that it feels like High School Musical with martial arts. Who knows, maybe if Goku and Master Roshi broke out into song and dance it might have made the film more engaging.

Director James Wong has shown he could write some tense and chilling science fiction fare before by penning many episodes of the X-Files and Millennium but his film directing skills are pure vanilla lacking any sort of stylistic flair. This was apparent even in his earlier films such as Final Destination or The One but he hits a dubious new low with Dragonball Evolution with ridiculously inappropriate static camera work that just does not make use of a film’s expanded canvas. Action scenes are choppily edited to hide the fact that none of the actors looks vaguely proficient in martial arts and even the final showdown that we anticipate is woefully flat and altogether anticlimactic.

Most of these young actors as well as Chow Yun-Fat will escape from this ordeal with their careers intact but it’s James Wong who will find his directorial career on the rocks with this slothful rambling disaster that manages the double whammy of insulting diehard Dragonball fans and the general public. You have been warned.

* out of ****

2009, USA/Hong Kong, 85 Minutes, PG
Directed by James Wong
Screenplay by Ben Ramsey
Based on the manga by Akira Toriyama
Produced by Stephen Chow
Executive Producer Tim Van Rellim
Original Music by Brian Tyler
Cinematography by Robert McLachlan
Film Editing by Matt Friedman, Chris G. Willingham

Goku: Justin Chatwin
Master Roshi: Chow Yun-Fat Chow
Bulma: Emmy Rossum
Chi Chi: Jamie Chung
Lord Piccolo: James Marsters
Yamcha: Joon Park
Mai: Eriko Tamura
Grandpa Gohan: Randall Duk Kim
Sifu Norris: Ernie Hudson
Carey Fuller: Texas Battle
Seki: Megumi Seki
Oozaru: Ian Whyte
Agundes: Richard Blake
Moreno: Jon Valera

© 2009 The Galactic Pillow

Glorious special effects cannot save Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen from being an almost completely incomprehensible debacle saddled with a plot that meanders for almost an hour too long filled with ridiculous new characters and groan worthy humour aimed at the lowest common denominator. As someone who liked the original film this sequel certainly delivers with more robot on robot bashing but the lack of any characterization and awfully stilted dialogue is a major disappointment. Fans of Michael Bay’s exuberant action might be satiated but there’s just way too much emphasis on adrenalin that it becomes mind-numbing with oddball moments that usually feature scrotums that inevitably plunge the production straight into the scrap heap.

Set approximately two years after the original film nearly all of the major characters, human and robots included, are back for the sequel. The heroic Autobots led by their leader Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) are joined by a few new compatriots such as Sideswipe, Jolt and two twins named Skids and Mudflap (Reno Wilson). There’s also the first female Autobot Arcee (Grey DeLisle) who is actually made up of three separate transforming motorcycles. For the past few years the Autobots have joined forces with parts of the US military to form the super secret NEST organization that is pledged to hunt down the remaining Decepticons who are spread out and hidden across the globe.

Meanwhile our lovable geeky hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is preparing his own rite of passage by leaving his girlfriend Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox) and his parents behind to go off to college. However, in an accidental move he touches the remaining shard of the allspark that he kept from the previous movie as cryptic information starts downloading into his brain in a torrent of unintelligible symbols and images.

While all this is going on the evil Decepticons under their interim leader Starscream (Charles Adler) are licking their wounds and preparing their next move which occurs when their communications expert Soundwave (Frank Welker) hacks into a US military satellite and discovers the location of their deceased commander Megatron (Hugo Weaving). Retrieving his body they reanimate him as he reports in to their supreme commander, The Fallen (Tony Todd) back on Cybertron who tells him that in order for them to prevail that the last remaining Prime aka Optimus must be terminated. Once this is done then they can activate their super weapon which will destroy the Sun thus blasting Earth to oblivion.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen works like a standard potboiler Hollywood sequel to a hit film meaning it’s blessed with a largely increased budget and a license to jack up the action to stratospheric levels. In this sense director Michael Bay is clearly in his element ramming scene upon scene of wanton destruction as he blows up every object imaginable. Bay has always been defined as being an architect for testosterone filled sequences and two in particular stand out here the first being a wonderfully shot battle in a forest as Optimus Prime takes on a horde of Decepticons while whooping ass and of course the climactic battle royale amidst the famed Pyramids at Giza that probably cost more than the total GDP of a small country.

One of the biggest gripes with the original was that as glorious as the CG was, Bay’s reliance on tight angles and close ups did nothing but obscure the action and turn it into an indecipherable jumble of metal parts flailing away with no rhyme or reason. This time around it’s a bit easier to discern who is fighting who but Bay still relies on split second cuts that make it tough to tell what is transpiring especially when any transformer goes toe to toe in an all out fist fight. With the ridiculously detailed special effects it would have been nice to just have a few good multi-second shots of the various robots to give the audience a better understanding of who is who but alas that is not to be.

Action fans will not be disappointed as the film feels as if it is wall-to-wall mayhem but strangely this is completely off-putting as there’s just too much here. As wonderful as the climax is by the time it gets there most of the audience is going to be too stupefied to care as all the robot bashing becomes a complete blur. It also doesn’t help at all that there’s just no emotional attachment to the bulk of these robots as the film has mismanaged the time spent building them up.

With an expanded cast this sequel feels enormously undercooked and woefully inadequate even though it runs two and half hours. All the new characters are barely given enough screentime to make any sort of poignant impact and thus function as nothing more than pretty mannequins to add to the scenery. Worse still, those who do manage to get more time are downright risible must notably the Autobot twins Skids and Mudflap who have clearly been compared to that infamous CG monstrosity Jar Jar Binks from the Star Wars prequels. With their faux-ghetto speech, gold capped teeth and nauseating personality it’s a wonder Black action groups aren’t more up in arms with this ridiculous stereotyping. Whenever they are on screen you end up praying some Decepticon would just materialize and vaporize their mechanical ass to oblivion.

As the first female robot on either side Arcee is a utter waste of celluloid and it is supremely obvious Michael Bay has no clue how to use her or even worse, just doesn’t care for the character in the least. Why should a robot have gender is probably a damn good question but if you are going to have a Decepticon with giant bouncing testicles there’s no reason to think that there aren’t going to be any females either. Then again, like most pressing issues here the number one tactic to answering these questions is merely to ignore that it even exists. It doesn’t mean that the movie should take a twenty minute sidebar to espouse upon gender issues as they pertain to robots but a line or two is all you really need. After all, Mikaela is your lead female character who already rides motorcycles yet she never gets to ride or talk to the only female Autobot seems like a no-brainer creative decision that never materializes.

Alas the entire script is rife with problems such as this and feels every bit as fragmented as it sounds with missed opportunities and a general lack of polish. A good sequel inevitably manages to take existing characters and provide situations which can show growth but here everything takes a back seat to the robotic carnage. All the human characters are incredibly underwritten even our two leads Sam and Mikaela who spend the bulk of the movie basically running their ass off from location to location with a few mere pauses to stare longingly into each others’ eyes and are further saddled with the oldest moronic romantic cliché in the history of cinema of not being able to say, “I love you,” to one another. The original movie by comparison is a thunderous work of art in terms of characterization. Part of the appeal there was to watch lovable loser Sam manage to hook up with the gorgeous girl while juggling the fact that he was being drawn into an intergalactic robot war. This time around he’s already gotten the girl and the screenwriter’s have not managed a suitable emotional replacement instead relying on ridiculous sitcom antics that seem to be ripped from teen romance movies where the girl catches a glimpse of her lover in the act of being kissed by another hot babe and immediately thinks the worse of him.

Shia LaBeouf’s considerable talents are almost completely wasted here as he’s given nothing to work with except shouting and staring wide-eyed at the green screen battles going on around him. His co-star Megan Fox is still smoking hot but seems more like a walking Barbie doll this time around as she preens and poses with her impeccable makeup. Faring even worse are Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson as Major Lennox and USAF Master Sergeant Epps who really only get procedural moments of dialogue and spend the movie in unending shots of them aiming their machine guns or looking perplexed.

Add to this an awful misuse of banal wit that usually results from either brain-dead characters like Sam’s ditzy mother who gets high on weed or ridiculous scenes of any sort of humping. Yes, that’s right; we get not one but two scenes of animal on animal action as well as a tiny shrimp of a Decepticon who speaks like a wannabe gangster doing the nasty on Mikaela’s leg. Of course there are the two Jar Jar Binks clones but there’s also the returning comic relief from the original film in Agent Simmons (John Turturro) who at least has decided to throw caution to the wind and ham it up to the nines. With all these kooky characters the film decides to still go full out overkill and adds Sam’s conspiracy-theorist roommate Leo Spitz (Ramon Rodriguez) who spends the majority of the movie screaming like a little girl or reduced to waddling around with no pants asking for toiler paper. Really, this is like every bad sitcom reject rolled into one honking mess of a film.

Fans of the film, Michael bay obviously included, will probably blanch and use the “You don’t get the gist of the movie” argument but they are sorely misinformed. It’s not that detractors of the film don’t understand it but that they truly “get it” well enough. As a big Hollywood action spectacle featuring an enormous budget the movie is pure non-stop visceral thrills with each sequence becoming more and more elaborate. No one is questioning the film’s technical merits as it’s evident that much care went into making a visual feast but boy is the screenplay ragged and filled with non-stop banalities that function to kill whatever pace is set with the adrenalin action segments.

The audience doesn’t care one hoot whether or not any of these characters, be it man or machine, dies or gets injured in the least and making matters worse is that the film lacks a monstrous and scheming villain. Even though Megatron is back he’s reduced to simple groveling and in another ode to Star Wars is revealed to be The Fallen’s apprentice. Oh please give us a break. Megatron might not have had enough dialogue in the original film but when he finally awoke there was no doubt he was numero uno honcho there with enough snarling anger that could kill Autobots just with aggressive staring. To see him as a simple lackey this time around and getting his ass handed to him by Optimus even though it was the other way around in the first film’s climactic fight just devalues his character. In his place, The Fallen is generic badguy #512 with a ridiculously overwrought super weapon that is nullified with a few shots yet for all his menace he doesn’t do much more than wax on about how he’s been waiting patiently for revenge over thousands of years.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is one of those movies that might work well on Blu-ray or DVD solely based on the fact that the audience can just ram the fast forward button to watch all the gnarly special effects work. It’s too bad actually since there’s so much material here that if honed and packaged differently could make a rip-roaring action film as well as make these characters compelling. I previously reviewed Star Trek by the same team of Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and while that was nearly pitch perfect in bringing the successful elements of the TV series into the new millennia Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen feels as if it was written on the fly as they were filming. There’s really no other reason that one can think of as the script does no favors to everyone involved.

There are rumours that Michael bay wants a break before the next installment or indeed doesn’t want to handle it anymore but regardless of his decision I sincerely hope Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman sit down and take a long look at all the problems embedded in this sequel and attempt to correct them. If all we’re going to get is a third film with even bigger explosions you might as well just go bang your head against the wall in order to simulate the headache you received watching the second installment.

*1/2 out of ****

2009, USA, 150 Minutes, PG-13, Dreamworks/Paramount
Directed by Michael Bay
Screenplay by Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman
Produced by Ian Bryce, Tom DeSanto, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Don Murphy
Executive Producer Michael Bay, Brian Goldner, Steven Spielberg, Mark Vahradian
Original Music by Steve Jablonsky
Cinematography by Ben Seresin

Sam Witwicky: Shia LaBeouf
Mikaela Banes: Megan Fox
Major Lennox: Josh Duhamel
USAF Master Sergeant Epps: Tyrese Gibson
Agent Simmons: John Turturro
Leo Spitz: Ramon Rodriguez
Ron Witwicky: Kevin Dunn
Judy Witwicky: Julie White
Alice: Isabel Lucas
Galloway: John Benjamin Hickey
Professor Colan: Rainn Wilson
Optimus Prime (voice): Peter Cullen
Jetfire (voice): Mark Ryan
Mudflap (voice): Reno Wilson
Ironhide (voice): Jess Harnell
Ratchet (voice): Robert Foxworth
Sideswipe (voice): André Sogliuzzo
Arcee (voice): Grey DeLisle
Megatron (voice): Hugo Weaving
Fallen (voice): Tony Todd
Starscream (voice): Charles Adler
Soundwave / Devastator: Frank Welker

© 2009 The Galactic Pillow