Dragonball: Evolution

Review by Anthony Morris

All you need to know about the original Dragonball manga and anime series is this: it's all about insane, over-the-top fight scenes. 

We're talking about fight scenes that, in the Dragonball Z series of half-hour cartoons, often run for five or six episodes. At least.

Now, all you need to know about this westernised lie-action version of the Dragonball series is this: no insane, over-the-top fight scenes. There are plenty of fight scenes in this film mind you, but they're just your standard kids kung fu stuff that we've all seen before in, say, the Streetfighter movie. Still, that doesn't prevent the early scenes of this film from being reasonably entertaining in a totally non-demanding way as our young, super-talented fighter hero gets trained by his wise old grandfather and tries to score with the hot girl at school despite the constant bullying he suffers because a): he has a weird haircut, and b): he's so amazingly good at fighting he's not allowed to fight regular kids for fear he'll kick their heads off or something cool like that. 

Suddenly along comes a green-skinned bad guy from the past (James Marsden) to collect all the mysterious, powerfull Dragonballs so he can do a bunch of evil stuff, and he has to be stopped by our hero doing a bunch of forgettable stuff no-one really cares about because if you're watching this chances are you know enough about Dragonball to want to see an insane fight. Which never happens. So why they bothered to adapt the Dragonball series when they could have simply remade, say, Mortal Kombat is a mystery no-one's going to care enough to solve.

2 out of 5