Evolution

You ever read a review and someone says that there’s a good movie buried or hidden in a bad movie? Evolution isn’t that. It is exactly what it presents as: a stubbornly unfunny movie that lives in the shadow of two other movies. It desperately wants to be Ghostbusters mixed with Men In Black, but it can’t even be as good as the inferior sequels to these movies. It fails in so many ways, it’s almost a marvel to see. Casting and characters? Painful. David Duchovny is charmless, Orlando Jones is a caricature, Seann William Scott is doing a dollar store version of his own schtick, and Julianne Moore is present. Chemistry is non-existent, and characterizations are all over the map. For a movie that so desperately is aping Ghostbusters (it’s from the same director), it forgets that each of the leads brought their own sensibilities and styles to the material; Aykroyd was the blue collar believer, Murray the sarcastic skeptic, Ramos the dry intelligence, and so on. Here, everybody is everything; sometimes, Duchovny is the straight man, sometimes he’s smarmy, sometimes, he’s … well, attempting a facsimile of endearing, but never really achieves it. And the same goes for the rest of the cast, save for Moore, who is almost entirely humorless save for a running gag about being clumsy that has no payoff whatsoever. Speaking of the “comedy”, there is none to be had here. None at all. I’ve laughed more mowing my lawn. All the lines are duds, and you can feel whatever intention at more intelligent humor die a lonely, withered death about 30-40 minutes in, as they go for juvenile South Park jokes about farts and pulling an alien out of a guy’s butt. I could go on and on about this movie’s catalog of faults, because it is a comprehensive failure — the editing, the way there are huge holes in the narrative but the movie still manages to feel over-stuffed by a good 20 minutes, the latent racism in some of the jokes … the laundry list is endless. But when you have a comedy without comedy, and an ensemble movie where the ensemble makes less sense than a Mad-lib filled out by someone unfamiliar with the language … I mean, what’s the point of going into detail? It’s bad. It’s just bad.