Meet Dave

Not that this is terribly important, but this is the first movie my almost-three-week old daughter saw. Obviously it's now been two days since she saw it, so she is actually three weeks now. She was very good and stayed awake for the first hour of the movie before sleeping for the last forty-four minutes of it, which I think shows particularly good taste.

Back in the day - and I'm talking the 80s here, when Jean-Claude Van Damme was a legitimate action hero and Bill Murray didn't have his head up his arse - Eddie Murphy was the king of comedy flicks. And it basically came down to the fact that someone, somewhere, knew what Murphy was good at; put the man in a buddy flick, make him a charismatic, street wise, punster, and give him a solid straight man to play off. Oh yes, we got Beverly Hills Cop, 48 Hours, Trading Places, Coming To America...hell, even Beverly Hills Cop II had a certain charm about it. Then the naughty nineties hit and suddenly Eddie wasn't quite as funny as he used to be. He stopped doing buddy movies and started to be the solo star of his movies. And it wasn't so great. Worse, he stumbled on the idea that he should have someone to play off - and that someone should be himself...under latex.

Meet Dave is about a group of tiny aliens who crash on Earth to destroy it in order to save their planet. The thing is, their spaceship is a human-sized version of the captain. Cue Eddie playing both the Captain and the spaceship, and of course, cue utter hilarity as Eddie acts learning to walk, learning to speak and...other stuff.

The problem is, and it's a biggie people, the spaceship is supposed to be a sympathetic, unapproachable figure, and that's not really the kind of character dear old Eddie is good at playing. "In the day" he was the wise-cracking, charismatic one, not the moody, marshmallow-centered one. And Eddie is a bit of a one trick pony. The part, really, would have been handled better by someone like Will Ferrell or Steve Carrel who are both really good at playing that sympathetic, cold kind of character. Even John C Reilly, failing Ferrell.

The rest of the cast suffer from being pretty much underdeveloped. Gabrielle Union plays the third in command of the ship, who has a crush on the captain, and seems to be mildly bi-polar, being cold and efficient most of the time, but every so often bursting out into the Earth-affected character. Everyone else on the ship is a stereotype: the secretly gay security guard; the dorky engineer; the uptight second officer; the fat waste disposal guy...the list goes on. The real humans are not that much better off, although at least they get a little more dialogue to play with.

Meet Dave is actually a pretty neat concept, but it is just poorly executed. Even the special effects look...well, a little less than special. It would be cheaper to watch it on DVD and probably look just as good.

"C+"