Meet Dave

Silly yet entertaining, Meet Dave casts Eddie Murphy as both a human-sized spacecraft named Dave and its miniaturized captain – with the film following the cybernetic organism as it arrives in New York City hoping to retrieve an orb vital to its planet’s survival. Director Brian Robbins, working from a screenplay by Rob Greenberg and Bill Corbett, has fashioned a fish-out-of-water tale that’s initially quite charming, as the filmmaker focuses on Dave’s expectedly goofy efforts at blending into contemporary society (as well as his tentative friendship with Elizabeth Banks’ friendly single mother and her inquisitive young son). And while a lot of this stuff is almost excessively juvenile (eg Dave sharpens a pencil in his ear, Dave poops money, etc), the movie possesses an easy-going vibe that ultimately proves irresistible – with Murphy’s engaging, sporadically hilarious performance effectively carrying the proceedings through its more overtly ineffective interludes (ie the incongruously action-oriented third act). The eclectic support cast, which includes, among others, Ed Helms, Kevin Hart, and Scott Caan, contributes heavily to the pervasively affable atmosphere, while it’s hard to deny that some of the jokes and one-liners are admittedly much funnier than one might’ve anticipated (eg one of the tiny crewmen refers to human beings as “gargantuan savages”). The end result is an effort whose unabashedly puerile sensibilities will surely turn off a good proportion of non-adolescent viewers, yet there’s little doubt that one could certainly do much worse as far as Murphy’s family-friendly output goes.

**1/2 out of ****