Evolution
**1/2
Cinema
Releases - December 14, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate PG. 105
minutes. Directed by Ivan Reitman. Written by David Diamond, Don Jakoby,
David Weissman; from a story by Jakoby. Starring David Duchovny, Orlando
Jones, Julianne Moore, Seann William Scott.
"Evolution" is bright and breezy
and mildly amusing, but mainly pretty flat, and never quite takes off the
way it should. It's another one of those movies with comic surprises that
unfold spectacularly well over the course of a two-minute trailer but don't
impress us much in the context of a two-hour film.
David Duchovny and Orlando Jones star as a pair
of science professors who stumble on an extra-terrestrial crash site whose
residue is evolving into a killer species at an alarmingly fast rate. Seann
William Scott plays a goofy trainee fireman tagging along for the ride, and
Julianne Moore pops up as an old flame of Duchovny who works for the government,
and is trying to keep the extent of the alien problem under
wraps.
There are a lot of jokes about goo and goblins,
and jokey interaction between the players, all of which works to varying
degrees. Ivan Reitman is a good comic director, and he is working with an
accomplished cast, but here they do not have great material. The directorial
style is a less taut copy of Barry Sonnenfeld's work on "Men in Black" and
the writing is a failed attempt to replicate the genius of Reitman's own
"Ghostbusters".
One crucial difference between those great movies
and this mediocre one is that they featured straight men for the funny men
to play off. They weren't just cases of Will Smith and Bill Murray spewing
one-liners. "Evolution" makes all the main players a little goofy -- Duchovny
and Jones are both mischievous jokers; Scott is a village idiot type; Moore's
character is hard-assed and straight-laced, but in a way that mocks itself,
and she is also the butt of an embarrassing running joke that requires her
to stumble a lot.
There's an ironic lesson here: if you try to make
everyone a little funny in a picture like this, you make everything a lot
less funny. Comic energy comes about when characters react comically, not
when they trundle through everything with lighthearted wisecracks and
winks.
The movie does offer two priceless tidbits: 1)
a line by Jones regarding lubricant, which I will not give away, and 2) an
ingenious 11th hour development whereby the heroes discover they can annihilate
the villains using dandruff shampoo.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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