DEEP/DIVE – Dragonball: Evolution (2009)

Greetings all and welcome to DEEP/DIVE: FilmBunker’s newest (and greatest) editorial series! Join us for a somewhat regular column, where we will skewer, dissect and gleefully over-analyse a wide selection of fine films without any real need for doing so, because ‘The Internet’. Said films may be approaching, or have surpassed, a particular retrospective milestone. They may have penetrated the cultural zeitgeist in a way that demands increased attention from neurotic and/or caffeine-riddled critics. Or they might just have, like, really dank memes. Whatever the reason, FilmBunker is ready wade through a sea of hot takes and pop-up browser tabs in order to take the plunge.

Dragonball: Evolution (2009)

Released: March 10 (Japan)/April 10 2009 (US)

Directed by: James Wong

Runtime: 85 minutes

Sometimes a film is so utterly and irredeemably terrible, so jaw-droppingly, face-palmingly, hands-in-the-fucking-air cringe inducing that you can block it out of your mind entirely and repress that shit deep down in the Jungian depths of the subconscious. So much so, that—years later—a humble and entirely benevolent re-watch can feel in every way like a first-time pass through a disturbingly familiar nightmare of your own creation. Such was my personal experience with the indominable train-wreck that is 2009’s Dragonball: Evolution.

Now, seeing as we’ve already dispensed with the niceties: some context. Growing up as a nerdy kid in regional Australia, without access to decent internet or pay/cable television, my only exposure to Japanese anime came in the form of weekly serialised content delivered through that paragon of free-to-air children’s entertainment, Cheez TV. In the early hours before being whisked away to school for subsidised bullying and adolescent self-loathing, I would watch shows like Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Sailor Moon with a curious mix of awe and Western detachment. Anime was clearly different from other cartoons, and none was more alien and exciting to me than the unhinged, explosive revelry of Dragonball-Z.

Seeing a show pack in bizarre food jokes, gratuitous training montages and an ensemble of quirky minor characters against primary battle sagas that took literal weeks to culminate their starting and/or finishing moves, which also typically featured the wholesale destruction of entire planets, was a transcendental experience for my formative pre-teen brain. So, while I may not be all that familiar with Dragonball (in both its manga and anime forms) as the series which sets up the later events contained within Dragonball-Z, I do however have enough residual in-universe knowledge of the series to comprehend that what Dragonball: Evolution offers up is nothing less than an outright abomination, and a blatant insult to creator Akira Toriyama’s original source material.

In truth, the details surrounding the production of this (dare I say it) film are innumerably more interesting than anything displayed on screen during its entire runtime. After acquiring the rights to the Dragonball franchise in 2002, it took 20th Century Fox almost seven years to bring a feature film to the cinema. A lot of that seems to do with finding a director for the project, given that big names like Stephen Chow, Robert Rodriguez and even Zack Snyder passed on the opportunity. (After witnessing the wholesale destruction waged by Kal-El and Zod in Man of Steel (2013), part of me shivers at the thought of what a Snyder-ised Dragonball-Z film might actually look like.) Eventually, Fox settled on television producer and director James Wong, whose credits point to Final Destination (2000) and the Jet Li-vehicle The One (2001), while the studio actively ignored input and ideas from Toriyama himself, with hired gun Ben Ramsey writing the treatment and screenplay.

Upon release, Dragonball: Evolution was almost universally derided by fans and critically savaged by the press. At the time of writing, the film sits on a 2.6/10 from IMDb, with 15% and 45% scores from review aggregator sites Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic respectively. In 2016, after being contacted by Dragonball fan and writer Derek Padula for comment on the film, Ramsey apologised for his part in the entire clusterfuck, saying: “To have something with my name on it as the writer be so globally reviled is gut wrenching. To receive hate mail from all over the world is heartbreaking. I spent so many years trying to deflect the blame, but at the end of the day it all comes down to the written word on page and I take full responsibility for what was such a disappointment to so many fans. I did the best I could, but at the end of the day, I ‘dropped the dragon ball.’” Yikes. In the same year, along with Dragonball’s 30-year anniversary milestone, Toriyama would officially reject the film as representative of the Dragonball series altogether.

Now, as you can probably gather, there were a multitude of things inherently wrong with Dragonball: Evolution before production even started, not to mention as a ‘finished’ product and its eventual release. So much so, that, in the interest of time and expediency and word count, I honestly cannot list them all here. It’s definitely a ‘watch this shit for yourself and find out’ kind of deal. But this wouldn’t be DEEP/DIVE if I didn’t include just a small fraction of the perfect storm of fuckery that aggregates into one of the most mind-numbingly awful film-watching experiences possible.

Story:

• Super-serious narration over cosmic opening credits? Check. Needlessly convoluted backstory? Check.
• Also, Lord Piccolo (not King Piccolo for some reason) is meant to be imprisoned and sealed away for eternity by a bunch of mystics, but then, uh oh! He gets out. How you ask? Not relevant. And now he just stares menacingly into the distance from an airship with a ninja henchwoman. Cool…
• Of course, Goku is in high school and only cares about girls and being a coward, because apparently this is a ’90s rom-com.
• Bulma’s one-sentence introduction with flashback montage is about as ham-fisted and lazy as screen-writing gets.
• You know, for a film about Dragonballs, you sure don’t see them much. Somehow, Piccolo just magically has them and the protagonists really suck at finding them.
• Oh, a post-credit scene too? Yep. They actually thought they were going to get sequels to this pile of shit.

Casting:

• I picture Justin Chatwin arriving to do his reading for this film and everyone in the room being like, “Stop! That’s our Goku!” before he even opens his dumb mouth. That’s really the only thing that makes sense.
• Also, James Marsters apparently had to sit through four hours of make-up each day as Piccolo, just so he could end up looking like a cheaper version of Peter Greene’s Dorian Tyrell from The Mask (1994).
• Side note: Goku’s bully was played by a real-life human being named ‘Texas Quency Battle’ (legit) who is now 38-years old. Which means that a 28-year old man played a high school bully in a Western adaptation of a Japanese manga & anime because, Hollywood.
• Surely Emmy Rossum’s friends still give her shit about this film, right? Like, you don’t get away with acting this bad. She’s friggin Bulma and doesn’t even have blue hair!
• It’s also weird seeing Chow Yun-fat as Master Roshi. On paper it should work, but half of the time it feels like he feels like he’s in a different film.

Direction:

• Everything from the framing, to the lighting, to the painful dialogue and the atrocious editing compounds the abject shitiness of this film.
• The opening scene of Gohan and Goku really sets the tone for just how dreadful the action will be. If anything, the film peaks early.
• The fight scene with Goku and bullies at Chi-Chi’s house party is laughably bad, especially when one dude literally head-walks over a car in a true “fuck you” to physics and gravity.
• Chi-Chi’s fight tournament reminds me of DOA: Dead or Alive (2006). So yeah, there’s that.
• Let’s talk CGI, because, the green screen used when the group is on Bulma’s stupid bike, right before they ‘fall’ into the trap laid by the bizarro Bill & Ted version of Yamcha, has to be one of the worst fucking things I’ve seen in a feature film. Ever.
• Also, Chatwin’s transformation into Ōzaru is some real uncanny valley shit. It makes the visual effects for Ivan Ooze in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (1995) appear positively trailblazing.

Look, when it comes to hanging shit on bad films, Dragonball: Evolution is the definition of low-hanging fruit. (How good are mixed metaphors though?) It’s very telling when you can put a film on for the sole purpose of hate-watching it, writing notes and finding flaws to make fun of, and still be too bored to pull that off effectively. Frankly, the world would be a much better place if this film just didn’t exist, and it was banished to the ‘Blackhole Bargain Bin of Much-Maligned Adaptations’ alongside Super Mario Bros. (1993) and M. Night Shyamalan’s abysmal The Last Airbender (2010). Much like a certain U.S. President that rhymes with lump, Dragonball: Evolution is loud, orange-tinged, messily incoherent and full of bad ideas horribly executed. This film has zero ki, a -1,000,000 power level and deserves to be crushed under the weight of its own stupidity in Dr. Brief’s Gravity Machine.

Join us next time for more DEEP/DIVE, where we hesitantly swallow the red pill (shut up, Reddit) and fall down the ground-breaking rabbit hole of ’90s action sci-fi with The Matrix.