Meet Dave Is Both Universally Lame and a Galactic Bore

By Adam Pope July 10, 2008 Issue

Eddie Murphy tries his hand at an interstellar family film with this new interpretation of visitors from another planet. Since no Murphy film could be complete without the star taking on multiple roles, Eddie plays both the captain of the alien spaceship and the ship itself, which is stocked to the brim with Lilliputian astronauts.

The premise of the movie is simple enough. The planet Nil is dying from a lack of salt, and the Nilians have come to drain the Earth’s oceans to replenish their supply. However, before the S.S. Norbit arrives, they send a sphere to begin siphoning off the water supply. This sphere veers off course and crashes through the window of Josh—a 12-year old science whiz living alone with his single mom—and into his goldfish bowl. Soon after, Eddie Murphy himself crash lands in front of the Statue of Liberty and begins the hunt for the sphere, which obviously has not completed its mission.

The outside story is mirrored by an equally bland storyline involving the crew on the inside. The egotistical captain (Murphy) pilots and voices the spaceship—which adopts the name Dave Ming Chang, three common first names on Earth—completely oblivious to the sentiments of the crew around him. As the captain and his beautiful information officer (Gabrielle Union) begin going native after getting a dose of Earth’s finer qualities, the second-in-command—the appropriately named Number 2, played by The Office’s Ed Helms—starts a mutiny to get the mission back under control.

At the beginning of the movie, the Nilians are a blatant personality rip-off of Star Trek’s Vulcans with their overly repressed emotions and blank facial expressions.They have even made the classic alien mistake of using dated video to disguise their spaceship, a vintage Bee Gees-inspired white disco suit being the product of their mastery of disguise.

This is the first of a long string of uninspired and unimaginative instances of physical comedy that drag the film along. The humor in the movie is simply not up to par, and Murphy—the king of rapid-fire dialogue in the beloved Shrek movies—instead goes for a completely one-dimensional performance of physical comedy which never quite gets off of the ground. The other actors are given nothing to work with and must settle for painfully obvious and stereotypical jokes—the security officer whose hour-long “coming out of the closet” is borderline offensive.

All in all, Meet Dave is another disappointment from Eddie Murphy who is on a serious decline since getting an Oscar nod for his moving and soulful performance in Dreamgirls. Whatever happened to the Beverly Hills Cop and The Nutty Professor? This movie is a painful example of what happens when you try to make a family film without a developed screenplay. Most audiences will be leaving the theater thinking, “Hey, at least it was better than Pluto Nash…”

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