MEET DAVE would be entirely harmless if it weren’t for the perfunctory feel of it all. Murphy is not the physical comedian necessary to pull this off, and without a solid script to back him up, it’s got nothing to recommend it except maybe that actor in a frogman suit clinging madly to a giant uvula as a the contents of a glass of water flow by. But that might just be the inherent wackiness of the uvula itself.
The problems begin with a script that takes no chances and direction that does little to revivify the staleness of its situations and characters. The one interesting premise, that Dave (Murphy) isn’t so much an strange visitor from another world, as the spaceship in which a whole passel of those inch-high visitors aboard. Crewmembers each have a different part of the ship/body to control once it’s on Earth and interacting with the human. It’s an idea rife with possibilities taken advantage of in a way that best be summed up in two words—Lieutenant Buttocks.
The captain of the ship is also played by Murphy, giving him the chance to take on two personas, neither of them particularly interesting aside from a fetching West Indian accent that he uses. The captain is a no-nonsense hero-type, oblivious to the goo-goo eyes that his comely Number 3 officer (Gabrielle Union) constantly makes at him. He’s so serious that he’s a serious drag on the comedy. Dave the ship is a work in progress, this gives Murphy the chance to walk funny, talk funny, and make odd contortions with his face as the crew tries to figure out how the mechanics of the ship work as well as the finer nuances of human interaction. Murphy does it all with an off-putting glassy stare that might be listed in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” as a symptom of something very unpleasant.
The nuances take a while, which leads to Dave being hit by a car shortly after arriving. This is a craft that survived interstellar space and a face-first landing at the base of the Statue of Liberty, so as the driver of the car, Gina (Elizabeth Banks) calls for an ambulance, Dave staggers away to make repairs. Gina, a widow who hasn’t gotten on with her life, invites Dave in for breakfast to make amends, which allows the writers to engage in all manner of obvious jokes with cats and catsup and what to do with an egg. It also allows them to have Dave take every idiom literally, which is anything but a new joke, and is handled with all the finesse of a sledge hammer. Because coincidence rules in films of this caliber, it turns out that the reason for Dave’s visit to our planet has to do with an orb sent ahead to de-water our world, which, for some reason will save the alien home planet. The orbshot straight through the window of Gina’s apartment and right into her son’s room. That would be Josh (Austyn Meyers), a cute and curly-haired moppet with a bully on his tail and a self-esteem quotient that is very, very low, a situation not helped when Gina doesn’t believe him when he says the rock that flew into his room came from outer space. Naturally, Dave becomes entangled in the lives of these two. Why Gina is taken with Dave, though, in a city known for wackos, is never quite made clear. Nor is the reason for including her handsome neighbor (Marc Blucas) in the story line. He is given little more to do that drop in for a minute or two every twenty minutes or so.
The rest of the film is riddled with predictable plot development and cliché characters. The only thing vaguely fresh is he New York City cop (Scott Caan) who is convinced that the hole left by Dave’s landing is something more than a case of vandalism, but even that angle is hampered by Caan’s overacting and the writing that leaves the other cops with nothing but a series of feckless macho posturing. The clincher is the attempt to get all warm and fuzzy about kids and love and the whole planet as being worth saving. Heart-warming, it is not with its stale, cloying dialogue. Annoying it is.
MEET DAVE isn’t the worst film that Eddie Murphy has ever made. Compared to, say, THE ADVENTURES OF PLUTO NASH or NORBIT, this is LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. It’s certainly not his best film, either. Rather, it is in that middling range, where the bland, the mediocre, and the lackadaisical reside. Film historians years from now might distinguish it as the point in Murphy’s career where he seemed to be downright confused about where to go next, which would explain why he went so many places here, and ended up running in circles.
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