Review of Dragonball Evolution (2009) by Snodog — 18 Apr 2021

With the name Dragonball: Evolution, I can understand the creators trying to make the concept more approachable to modern audiences. You can see this when they made Goku a 18 year old horn dog and making Yamcha a “dude bro”.

However, this was executed exceptionally poorly. Not only did it miss all the key elements of the main characters, the movie itself is nonsensical. The movie is campy, cheesy, and poorly acted. The voice overs are atrocious and the special effects, well lets just say they’re not very special.

This felt more like a Disney straight to TV movie like Luck of the Irish or Zenon: Girl of the 23rd Century. You can tell this movie was made with no love from anyone on the production team, including the actors.

It’s actually very sad because Justin Chatwin and Emmy Rossum are excellent in their follow up roles in the show Shameless. Dragonball is beloved by too many people for someone to barf out a script and having the actors phone in a performance.

It shows courage that the writer apologized for this mess years later, but one writer does not make a movie. The fact that this was even approved shows that no one in Hollywood cared even the slightest bit about transforming arguably the biggest anime series of all times to a life action movie.

This movie failed on just about every level. The writing, acting, effects, story, characters, and editing are all just a massive mess. I can’t imagine one single fan was on the production team, because if their was they would have at least spoken up about how this is nothing like the original and is, in fact, a mockery of it.

Instead, everyone kept their head down and pushed out this pile of cat vomit for a payday. I don’t have a problem with people making movies for money, it IS a business after all, but when your payday comes at the expense of something beloved by so many people is when you know you’ve made the worst of the worst.

It’s universally hated by Dragonball fans, and is even a terrible movie to watch with zero knowledge of the original series. Stay far away from this, its not even worth watching to make fun of, as its just a sad abomination of film making.