Dragonball Evolution Review

It must be a real drag being a Jungian archetype. Aside from the inconvenience of possessing a thousand faces, imagine minding your own business, practicing judo with some wise and wily sage, when you're suddenly handed a magic sword or glowing swishy stick and tipped headlong into some damnfool quest to go and rescue a princess and kill your dad - no, hang on, wrong shrink.

And the real bore of it all is, the thing that makes you want to stick your arms in a mincer, is that you know exactly what's going to happen next, which charming rogue you're going to meet on the road, which cuckolding temptress you're going to wind up married to for the next 100 years, and precisely which one of your battle-hungry, blood-crazed stepsons is going to do you in with a pillow when you're no longer fit to preside over a model railway set.

The story is old, but it goes on. And it's always a pleasure when it's well told. But when plots and characters are as insultingly stock as they are in Dragonball Evolution, you start fervently praying for a bit of Jodorowsky-style subversion, possibly involving the heroine, a sackful of syringes and a malnourished donkey called Carlos.

This resembles a fever dream you might have had after slipping into an E-number-aggravated blood sugar crash while watching the original Star Wars Trilogy. Dragonball Evolution is so derivative, such a bare-faced rip-off of George Lucas' pension, that it actually seems completely pointless to pick holes in it. You might as well just attack the originals for their myriad faults and get two birds with one stone.