Meet Dave

• USA • 2008 • 90m •

• Directed by: Brian Robbins. • Starring: Eddie Murphy, Elizabeth Banks, Gabrielle Union, Scott Caan, Ed Helms, Kevin Hart, Mike O'Malley, Pat Kilbane, Judah Friedlander, Marc Blucas, Jim Turner, Austyn Myers, Adam Tomei. • Music by: John Debney.

A spaceship shaped like a human lands face first on Liberty Island. Its crew (of tiny, intelligent, and unemotional beings) is looking for an orb sent from its planet to extract the oceans' salt, which will ruin Earth. The orb is in the possession of Josh, the fifth-grade son of a single mom whose car strikes the ambulatory alien spaceship and cripples its power supply. The crew has 48 hours to recover the orb, throw it in the Atlantic, and leave Earth. Over the course of two days, the ship's crew experiences chaos and emotion in New York. Do Earth's giants - Josh and his mom - have anything to teach these brainy aliens? Meanwhile, mutiny is afoot and the cops are closing in.

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2:06

Review:

After reading only bad reviews, I didn't expect much from this goofy movie, but surprisingly I got more than I expected. I figured this would be another Pluto Nash, with nothing funny or charming, and just a lot of dull clichés. This certainly at times was dull and very cheesy, and at times it was also clichéd, but there were actually some moments where I laughed. Sometimes because of something actually being funny, and sometimes because it was so bad I couldn't help but laugh at the incompetence of the writing. This was a bad movie, but better than I expected.

Aliens, which happen to look like small humans, have shot a tiny object down to Earth, and now they're here to retrieve it. The object is a little sphere which is needed to take all the water from Earth in order to attain the Earth's salt so their home planet can have power. Unfortunately for them, the little sphere has landed inside a young boy named Josh's room. The aliens come to Earth in a robotic vehicle designed after their captain (Eddie Murphy). This human body is eventually named Dave Ming Chang, by the suggestion of Josh's mother, Gina. Gina and Josh become friends with Dave, and a silly, fish out of water romantic comedy ensues.

As usual, I'm going to start with the negatives first. The unrealistic situations in this movie were annoying. Obviously, this is a sci fi comedy, but every other person in the movie other than the aliens are supposed to be normal human beings. Why in the world would Gina allow Dave into her house? Why would she find him charming? He acts like a lunatic goof-ball. The whole love story between Dave and Gina felt contrived, and it was, as was most of the movie, very silly. The characters aboard the vessel (the Dave vessel) were stupid and unfunny, and if it only took them 5 minutes to understand human love and emotion, then why did they not feel this before? Did they not re-procreate with a spouse to make more little aliens? I don't know, but it was just too rushed.

One scene that stood out as the worst written scene, or at least the most unrealistic, involved a hot dog eating contest. Dave is in a hot dog eating contest and eats 85 hot dogs, winning a stuffed animal as the grand prize. You know, I didn't realize they had hot dog eating contest booths that were free to join in. I always thought they were national and state wide competitions, not just a booth giving out a free meal. And the main prize was a stuffed animal? Wow, what a great gift to show off after eating 85 hot dogs.

This next paragraph contains a spoiler, so don't read if you care about how this movie ends for some reason. The ending made no sense. This orb, that Dave has been searching for, could easily be attained by just using some weird power that draws it to Dave's hand. Why didn't these aliens use this power earlier instead of looking around the whole city for the stupid sphere.

Onto the positives. Every once in a while, Eddie Murphy's fish out of water, goofy face, silly acting made me laugh. The special effects were not super great, but the sets were pretty neat to look at, especially inside Dave's body. The acting, though unrealistic, wasn't bad. The performances were clichéd, but that fault lays with the writers, not the actors. They were working hard with this flimsy material. This is an okay movie for families, in that there is very little crude humor and no language, but what family would want to sit through this? Overall, Meet Dave is a lame, clichéd comedy, but it's not without it's charm, and it at least deserves the credit of not being Eddie Murphy's worst.

Review by Tommy Nelson from the Internet Movie Database.

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