|
All-Reviews.com Movie/Video Review
Evolution
|
 out of 4
 Review by Susan Granger 2½ stars out of 4
|
"Let's shampoo some aliens," shouts David Duchovny to the Glen Canyon
Fire Department as they set off to save the world from total destruction
by phantasmagorical creatures from another planet. Absurd? Totally -
and that's the key this goofy sci-fi comedy from Ivan Reitman, who heists
the idea from his own "Ghostbusters." The story begins when meteor
crashes in the Arizona desert, narrowly missing a dense wannabe fireman,
Seann William Scott, practicing for his fire-fighting test. He alerts a
local geologist, Orlando Jones, who recruits Duchovny, a former government
scientist now teaching at a community college, and they discover one-cell
organisms that are evolving at an exponential rate. "Snag one and put
him in the bucket," says Duchovny, envisioning a Nobel Prize. "I've seen
this movie," Jones wise-cracks. "The black dude dies first. You snag it!"
There's the inevitable government interference in the form of Julianne
Moore, a brainiac epidemiologist from the CDC
(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), who soon realizes there's
a bigger danger than the military. And I'm not referring to Jones's anal
probe, Scott's serenade in a suburban shopping mall, or "Ghostbuster"
veteran Dan Aykroyd as the undignified Governor of Arizona. Ivan Reitman
and screenwriter Don Jakoby's satirical, cliche-laden,
four-misfits-save-the-universe formula is outlandish as Duchovny plays
preposterously off his wry, deadpan "X-Files" persona, while Jones provides
fast-paced comic relief - but not as effectively as Tommy Lee Jones and
Will Smith in "Men in Black." Moore's the klutzy, slapstick eye-candy
and Scott's there for the teeny-boppers. On the Granger Movie Gauge of
1 to 10, "Evolution" is a zany, silly 6. Rated PG-13, it's a cockamamie
summer comedy.
Copyright © 2001 Susan Granger
|
|
|
|


Buy movie posters!
|