Meet Dave戴夫号飞船 英语影评

In “Meet Dave,” the latest in a long line of disposable Eddie Murphy vehicles, the star talks funny, walks funny and enters a bathroom stall for some rather less humorous noisy business. In yet another potty scene (this movie knows its target audience), he stands with his legs apart as dollar bills float and coins (ouch) tumble from his posterior, excreting money like a slot machine that’s racked up three 7’s. He poops money for laughs, though of course what he’s really doing is pooping laughs for money. Talk about filthy lucre.

Mr. Murphy, alas, has been engaged in much the same dirty business for too much of his career. “Meet Dave,” which is about some itty-bitty aliens who land on Earth (the real and a back-lot New York City) for some reason or other, is by no means the worst of his projects. Directed by Brian Robbins, from a script by Rob Greenberg and Bill Corbett, the movie is clichéd but innocuous, one grating, swishy stereotype aside. The director and writers have all toiled in television’s laugh factory (Mr. Corbett is an alumnus of “Mystery Science Theater 3000”), and the movie plays like a half-hour sitcom episode that has been stretched — principally through Mr. Murphy’s walking and talking — to feature-length running time.

That some of this walking and talking is amusingly daft is to be expected. The movie’s opening, which finds one of the two characters Mr. Murphy plays newly landed on Earth and face down in dirt, features him executing a herky-jerky silly walk — at one point forming a series of cubistic right angles — that brings to mind the prime of Jerry Lewis and Steve Martin alike. This is a performer who, from his snapping, rubber-band mouth to his fancy-dancing toes, wrings comedy (and sometimes a little menace) from every twitch and tremble. I could watch Mr. Murphy go herky-jerky for 90 minutes, but these bits of pure comedy have been predictably folded into the usual filler: a cute kid, a love interest, some plot.

There is not much else to report, other than the giant tongue that unrolls like a red carpet, the shoe that puts the wing in wingtip and the likable Elizabeth Banks, who holds her ground against Mr. Murphy as an open-minded New Yorker. Of minor note is that Mr. Murphy’s penchant for playing more than one character, which until recently suggested an impatience with the limitations of most of his roles, has started to feel like a hedge against boredom. Though mildly amusing, his two characters in “Meet Dave” — a wee captain and a humanoid spaceship — neither tax nor stretch him. When the captain instructs the spaceship to walk and talk among the earthlings, it does so perfectly, the very picture of a well-oiled comedy machine.