Meet Dave

Starring Eddie Murphy, Elizabeth Banks, Gabrielle Union, and Ed Helms
Directed by Brian Robbins
Rated PG

This movie is still absolute garbage, from the initial concept to the dialogue, to Eddie Murphy's ridiculous accent-y accent, to the visual effects. Murphy plays Captain Kirk from another planet, except his USS Enterprise is actually just a human sized version of the captain himself. See, people are tiny on the captain's planet, and they need Earth's salt water to survive.

Seems like a bad reason to fly all this way, but whatever.

So from inside the lifelike robot version of Eddie Murphy, the real and tiny Eddie Murphy tries to retrieve an orb initially sent down to Earth to empty our oceans, but  somehow got off course and wound up in a kid's aquarium.

He makes human contact with a single mother and her son (Elizabeth Banks and Austyn Myers) and learns that humankind should not be destroyed, as people on his planet previously thought, but preserved.

Another curious thing happens during the journey, and it's the closest thing to a salvageable storyline in Meet Dave: The longer the captain and his crew are on Earth, the more human they become, with emotions, wants, and needs. That's the movie, not this other nonsense.

There are lame jokes strewn about here of the usual fish-out-of-water variety, a labored script and atrocious performances by Murphy, Ed Helms (The Office), who is trying to usurp the captain's power.

What truly sinks Meet Dave, which wasn't going to float for long anyway, are the effects and the sets designed to look something like the inside of a person. Since Dave is a ship, all of its crew members have posts throughout the body, and as I was watching the shoddy craftsmanship on display, I was reminded that Innerspace was released over 20 years ago and has a much better concept of what this kind of thing should look like.

Meet Dave is about as good as Pluto Nash, Murphy's previous space captain movie. That may not be saying a lot, but again, at least it's not The Love Guru.