Dragonball Evolution: Critic Reviews

Fans of the best-selling Dragonball comics (and cartoons, and videogames...) might have a shot at untangling the knotty dream-logic that strangles Dragonball: Evolution's live-action adaptation.

The giddy, anything-goes spirit of Japanese manga comics and Hong Kong martial arts flicks animates Dragonball Evolution. Not enough to make it a good movie, mind you, but enough so you won't hate yourself if you sit through it with the kids.

Evolution is far more entertaining than it deserves to be, unless you're a 10-year-old boy, in which case it's only the greatest movie ever made.

Dragonball Evolution doesn't take itself too seriously, but avoids campiness.

A hyperactively messy little adventure fantasy in which movement is everything and meaning means nothing.

There are a few entertaining fight scenes. But there is also uneven CGI, bad dialogue and a host of cliched moments that make Dragonball Evolution just another disappointing matinee movie.

This film offers further proof, as if any were needed, that Western filmmakers cannot do justice to their Eastern counterparts when it comes to retooling anime and/or Fant-Asia for Occidental consumption.

More concerned with recruiting the testosterone troubled boys of today than it is rewarding fans of yesteryear.

As far as 2009 flops will go, [this] could have been much worse to sit through...

A contender for the worst movie of the year was released in April.

For anyone writing it off as a kiddie film, Dragonball: Evolution should be considered child abuse. Put everyone involved with this catastrophe on the receiving end of a Kamehameha wave.

I am no expert in the field of Dragon Ball. However... the first live-action, English-language film in the franchise is absolutely insipid.

Faced with the choice of watching Dragonball: Evolution again and perishing in a fiery apocalypse, I'd take Judgment Day every time.

this first installment was actually entertaining enough that a sequel could work out the kinks to become a very solid franchise.

The producer, Stephen Chow, made the funny and original Kung Fu Hustle, but here he and director James Wong get into a terrible mess.

The story seems to have been made up as the film went along, and not by anyone talented. The fight scenes and special effects are shamefully pathetic.

Having been blandly adapted from a Chinese folklore-inspired Manga, that's about as much of the story that makes sense. Gibberish in the extreme, it has all the narrative cohesion of a trading card game.

A rather tame live-action sci-fi flick.

[Chow's] hamminess doesn't make Dragonball Evolution make more sense, but it's a great way to cope with an otherwise inexplicable kitschfest.

Dragonball's value -- such as it is -- is that it's too dumb to actively hate.

Poor Emmy Rossum went from "Phantom" to this. Now that's a career decline.

just another dull teen action film

The film is crammed with treats for old-school Dragonball fans. For everyone else, this amounts to another seen-it-before, probably-willing-to-see-it-again distraction, a passable collection of 'splosions and special effects for a slow film weekend.