Like most any kid growing up in the 1960s and '70s, I was fascinated with and entertained by movies that contained special effects and/or unusual storylines. Naturally, the likes of "The Wizard of Oz" were a perennial favorite, but I was always more attracted to the more contemporary ones of those days. As much as they could for a kid of my age, films such as "Planet of the Apes," "Westworld" and "Fantastic Voyage" simply blew my young mind.
It's far more difficult to impress today's young kids, simply because they've been exposed to far more spectacles than we ever could have imagined back in our day, what with video games and photorealistic, state of the art special effects that pretty much are a dime a dozen nowadays in all sorts of movies.
Thus, it's hard to say how they'll react to "Meet Dave," the latest film starring Eddie Murphy who was eliciting laughs decades before any of the targeted audience was born. After all, being a story about a robot isn't terribly novel (unlike when "Westworld" debuted) and with nanotechnology on the rise and most everything becoming miniaturized, the tiny people inside a "body" plot doesn't pack the awesome punch that accompanied Raquel Welch's inner-space journey back in '66.
What it has going for it (at least on paper), however, is good old-fashioned physical comedy, the likes of which young kids never seem to tire. And while Murphy can't quite match the rubbery face and body of someone like Jim Carrey or the finesse of Chaplin, Keaton or Sellers, he's clearly not a bad choice to pull off such humor.
And that's really the only part of that film that somewhat works, although the plethora of such efforts are of the hit and miss variety. In short, it's the same sort of humor that fueled "All of Me" and other related offerings where someone or something controls all or part of another person's body.
The attempted humor stems from the awkward movements and expressions of any such given moment, and Murphy does manage to elicit a chuckle or two doing so (although none of it's as inspired as the Steve Martin/Lily Tomlin combo in the aforementioned comedy).
Much of the rest involves the old fish out of water concept, something Murphy has previously mined in films ranging from "Coming to America" to "Trading Places." Alas, such attempts are less successful and/or fun this time around, while the meager attempts at social commentary by screenwriters Rob Greenberg & Bill Corbett fall even more flat.
They're about in line with the obligatory and predictable material where both parties (the humans and the aliens) help the other and/or open their eyes to a bigger world. The most egregious of that concerns Pat Kilbane playing the ship's security officer whose one exposure to a chorus line in the play of the same name releases his inner flamboyant gayness.
A subplot featuring Gabrielle Union falling for Murphy's captain thankfully isn't as offensive, but similarly goes nowhere. Overall, the performances are all broadly played at best, and thus range from mediocre to bad, while the special effects are decidedly less than state of the art.
Kids might enjoy the film as it unfolds, but I doubt it will stick with them for long, let alone decades later should they ever comment about seminal films in their past. Not as bad as "Norbit" (also helmed by director Brian Robbins) or "Pluto Nash" (faint praise if there ever was a case of that), "Meet Dave" is nevertheless a disappointment considering what Murphy was once capable of delivering long ago. It rates as a 3 out of 10.
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