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'Meet Dave'

Rating:

BY MICHAEL PHILLIPS | Chicago Tribune

July 11, 2008

Eddie Murphy has not lost it. He knows how to intone the phrase "my colon is impacted" with the right, robotic precision to bring out its maximum awkwardness.

He is a hugely talented performer and hardly the only A-lister coasting on the odd (usually not odd enough) formulaic PG "family" comedy.

But the heartbreaking thing about "Meet Dave," starring Murphy as a dude from another planet inhabited by a team of little men and women supplying his every word and move, is its occasional funniness amid a sea of pablum.

Fleeing its dying planet, a spaceship resembling a human (Murphy) crash-lands near the Statue of Liberty. The tiny little aliens operating the man-ship - Murphy plays its clipped-vowel captain - have come to suck the Earth's oceans dry. They need the salt.

The plot hinges on a wee asteroid that landed three months earlier in the fish bowl belonging to 11-year-old Josh (Austyn Lind Myers), the son of widow Gina (Elizabeth Banks), who creams Murphy's white-suited alien with her car.

Mainly, "Meet Dave" is an extended, repetitive out-of-towner sight gag. Better material and more adept direction (by Brian Robbins, who helmed Murphy's "Norbit") might've made this a perfectly solid commercial enterprise. As is, "Meet Dave" is imperfectly lame, and until stars like Murphy hold out for fresher goods, the multiplexes will continue to offer sporadically diverting time-wasters like this.

(PG)

PLOT A brother from another planet - inhabited by a team of little men and women supplying his every word and move - crash-lands on Earth.

CAST Eddie Murphy, Elizabeth Banks, Gabrielle Union

LENGTH 1:30

PLAYING AT Area theaters

BOTTOM LINE Occasionally funny, but essentially an extended, repetitive out-of-towner sight gag.