there are a lot of words i could use to describe this movie. they're not bad, but they're not good either. the ones that come to mind are usually ones like uninspired, half-hearted and charmless. ones that leave a lot to be desired. and that's how i felt leaving the theater.

i went to the movie with very low expectations. and while it was hard to take this movie in as a fan and with an audience more annoying than the screaming girls waiting for hannah montana in the lobby, i still tried to look at it from a neutral perspective.

unfortunately, from a cinematic standpoint, the movie suffers from a lot of shortfalls. at an hour and fourty minutes, they try to cram too much into too short of a time. and with the hollywood-infused storyline about goku being an awkward nerdy high school kid struggling to fit in, they waste too much time on the americanized muck and the actual plot suffers in the end. there's also many continuity errors, extremely bad pacing and a sprinkling of iffy acting.

and from a fan's standpoint it doesn't get much better. they do stick to some of the basics, and performances from bulma and piccolo are pretty strong. although piccolo's total screentime is pretty short, and his striking performance feels wasted on this usually cliché film. there are some glimpses of the DBZ universe throughout the movie (namely capsule corp and dbz-style worlds), but they are short and stunted, while the rest of the film takes place on drab looking styrofoam sets.

i appreciate that they tried to take the dragonball story and put a new spin on it. maybe it would have been good if they had been thoughtful about the acting, writing and CG. i'm not sure where the budget went, but it certainly did not go into making this film what it could have been.

they left it open for a sequel, but honestly i hope that does not happen. they need to scrap all of this, go back to the beginning and recast pretty much everyone from top to bottom. Rossum can still be Bulma and Marsters can still be Piccolo, but that's all i'm going to give them. they really cannot afford to screw up any more characters.

i don't think i would recommend this movie for theaters..mostly because the heckling audience ruined half the experience, but also for the quality of the film. there's half a dozen great scenes at best, but i have a feeling most dbz fans will walk out feeling insulted. the way this film was treated makes me wonder if the people responsible for it really have any respect for the source material. probably not, since the marketing for it was nothing more than a bad joke. let's look at the bright side, though - they really have nowhere else to go but up with this first film. let's hope they take a lesson from the response to this film and have a little more respect for the potential behind all the characters and stories available in Toriyama's work.

i give dragonball evolution 1.5 tin foil wrappers out of 5.