Meet Dave may not be the worst of the recent comedies from the Hollywood machine, but it does come close.
> Meet Dave
91 minutes
Rated PG (for bawdy and suggestive humour, action and some profanity).
Review by Ann Hornaday
Meet Dave is the kind of bland, generic, high-concept comedy that drives a critic to the thesaurus in search of new ways to say "vapid."
You know these movies: Headlined by a major star, supported by a cast of head shots with feet, working from a script by 17 writers, they're not made as much as extruded.
They're product, pure and simple, the pop culture equivalent of anything stamped out at a Detroit auto plant.
And their musical scores, for some reason, generally feature the same syncopated, pizzicato string arrangement that signals to viewers that they're watching a safe, utterly disposable comedy appropriate for the entire family.
Meet Dave doesn't feature the syncopated pizzicato, which is at least one mark in its favour.
Indeed, in the dubious firmament of like-spirited enterprises - think License to Wed or Fool's Gold - it doesn't qualify as the worst of the worst.
And it actually features a rather clever premise, ideally suited to the gifts of its star, Eddie Murphy: physical comedy and mimicry.
Murphy plays two roles here. One, the Captain, a two-inch-high alien in charge of a tiny crew of interstellar explorers.
Dave is the name of the crew's ship - a human-size robot modelled on the Captain - which has just crashed into New York's Liberty Island.
Meet Dave chronicles the exploits of Dave as he meets and tries to blend in with the locals; meanwhile, each of his "human" functions is being controlled inside his body by one of the Captain's tiny crew.
There are moments that make the most of Murphy's assets in Meet Dave, but not nearly enough of them.
He nails a few choice scenes here, including one in which he deftly imitates the dorky hyuk-hyuk inflections of one of the first white guys he meets, but for the most part Meet Dave features him moving with unblinking passivity through the urban landscape, uttering things like "My colon is impacted" with robotic flatness.
That's what's supposed to pass for comedy in Meet Dave, which co-stars Elizabeth Banks as Dave's budding love interest and Gabrielle Union as the Captain's long-suffering "cultural officer" (she does her field research via Google, prompting her boss to wonder why something so important was given such a silly name).
Go ahead and meet Dave. You'll no doubt forget him within minutes, but at least he came in peace.
