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At times like this—on nice, sunny, summery afternoons, when I’m faced with the task of writing a review for a movie that really doesn’t deserve any more of my precious time (or brain cells)—I really wish that I could just regurgitate my reviews. If it weren’t for my strong Dutch work ethic and my drive to provide my readers with original content on a daily basis, this would be my review for Eddie Murphy’s latest, Meet Dave:
Meet Dave: See The Love Guru. Replace “Mike Myers” with “Eddie Murphy,” and replace “guru” with “alien.”
And then, having gotten that out of the way, I could go and play outside or something—and I would be free from wasting anymore of my life on this movie.
But alas, that’s not the case—and the great outdoors will have to wait.
To be completely fair, I have to admit that Meet Dave isn’t quite as painful as The Love Guru. It is, however, very, very bad.
Murphy stars as the captain of a crew of tiny, emotionless aliens who have traveled to Earth in a big Eddie-Murphy-shaped spaceship in a last-ditch effort to save life on their home planet. After they arrive in New York, they meet Gina Morrison (Elizabeth Banks) and her son, Josh (Austyn Myers), who quickly befriend them (in the form of their human-looking ship, who introduces himself as Dave Ming Chang). And as they get to know Gina and Josh through the eyes of their spaceship, they start to wonder if Earth might be worth saving.
Like The Love Guru, Meet Dave is spectacularly light on story—and heavy on stereotypes, bad acting, and overused jokes. For the most part, it’s little more than a string of scenes showing “Dave” as alternately really, really smart and really, really stupid—after all, he can track someone’s exact location and solve complex mathematical equations, but he can’t seem to figure out that you’re not supposed to drink ketchup. Throw in a whole bunch of gay jokes and a smattering of butt jokes, and, apparently, you’ve got yourself a movie. Or at least if you’re Eddie Murphy, you do.
Fortunately, Meet Dave doesn’t take the same approach to comedy that The Love Guru did. It isn’t painfully and ridiculously outrageous, nor does it spend 90 minutes flinging bad jokes at viewers’ heads, hoping that something will eventually hit. Instead, however, it half-heartedly lobs its bad jokes, and it rarely hits the target. Though I did actually laugh a couple of times, let’s just say that I wasn’t laughing with Murphy.
Still, I almost wish that Meet Dave had been as horribly over-the-top as The Love Guru. If it had, at least I would have walked out of the theater feeling energized—eager to run right back to the office and write a scathing review. At least those are fun to write. Instead, I walked out feeling like I’d wasted a good chunk of a perfectly nice day on an inane and humorless flop. Instead of feeling angry, I just felt…depressed.
So don’t make the same mistake I did. Forget about meeting Dave—and go out and enjoy your summer instead.
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