I kind of liked this film.
But not in the way I normally like a film. Usually I'll enjoy a film because it's well-written, the acting is good, the storyline is engaging, it touches on themes that interest me, it has good directing and cinematography, it has nostalgic value or, at the bottom of the barrel, it's a guilty pleasure. Dragonball Evolution doesn't quite come under 'so bad it's good' territory, but rather 'so bad it's hilarious'. I'm not sure if anyone who doesn't know about the anime (I only have one volume of the manga, so I can't say much of that) would find it as funny as I did, but seriously, wow. If you don't take this crap seriously, it's a very funny film; funnier in fact than any of the comedies that I remember coming out that year. I remember me and my sister struggling not to burst out laughing right there in the cinema, and I spent the rest of the day quoting the laughably bad dialogue and imitating Justin Chatwin's howlingly awkward line delivery. I really did like it, even though I will be one of several thousand people to say that it really is a terrible, terrible film.
To give a brief overview of the film in terms of how good it is, well... in terms of faithfulness to the source material, the film is god-awful, and that is no exaggeration. Just about the only thing it has in common with Dragonball is the character names (and their basic roles as those characters, I suppose) and the dragonballs themselves. In terms of basic pacing, story-telling, and character establishment and development, the film is sub-par bordering on just plain bad; the plot is riddled with holes and it seems to meander without really going anywhere and the love story played out like it was simply tacked on at the end, for how uninteresting, untouching and irrelevant it was. Put simply, up until the third act, the film is just bad in a 'generic bad film' way; it isn't offensively bad, it's just not good. Then it dives head-first into what I like to call 'third act insanity'. However, in terms of entertainment value and unintentional hilarity, this film is actually very watchable. As a long-time fan of Dragonball Z (Dragonball less so, but that's because it didn't air in the UK until quite a bit later) I found the film very entertaining because it just got so many things wrong. From characters to the story to basic continuity, basically everything was just wrong but that's why I find it so funny. The ludicrous portrayal of Goku as an average teenager was hysterically funny, let alone Chatwin's poor performance and general lack of charm or screen presence. I know I lost it when Goku called out to the dragon in overly-dramatic fashion, immediately preceding possibly one of the worst CGI effects I've ever seen. It was goofy, predictable, and made what is admittedly a fairly silly, low-budget nineties fighting anime look like absolute gold by comparison. And I loved it. I know this film made a lot of fans really angry, but I really didn't take it that seriously. I knew it wasn't going to work as a live-action film, so I expected it to be crap, and it ended up being really quite enjoyable to watch anyway, if not for the reason the filmmakers intended.
So yes, I would actually recommend you watch this if you're a fan of Dragonball or Dragonball Z. Some of the scenes may be hard to get through, but I think it's worth it in the end.
Additional: Hell, at least the dialogue is better than in the original English dub of the anime. And in the movie's defence, it does provide a number of shout-outs to the original anime that were pretty sweet, if completely undercut by the mountains of mistakes.
Thinking about it, the film's portrayal of Goku was a lot closer to Goku's son Gohan. He was the highschooler who wanted a normal life and a girlfriend; Goku didn't give nearly enough of a shit about being normal, especially when he was a teenager. Besides; Great Saya-man? That would have been pretty damn funny to see. There's your movie.
