Meet Dave opens today, the latest in a long line of Eddie Murphy vehicles apparently designed to make you forget the man may ever have made you laugh. I wouldn't bother bringing this thing up at all, if not for the fact that it was co-written by Bill Corbett.
Corbett played Crow T. Robot for the last three seasons of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which makes him like unto a god for some of us. True, those seasons didn't quite represent the show at its best, but Corbett's characterization of Crow as both arrogant and self-loathing was absolutely brilliant. Of course, the main mission of MST3K was riffing on bad movies, and yes, there is irony in the fact that a guy who made his living making fun of bad movies has written what is almost certainly a very bad movie.
But did Corbett write a bad movie, or did it become bad after it left his hands? Though Corbett and his sometime collaborator Rob Greenberg are the only credited writers, the script definitely passed through other hands. And even if it hadn't, the chances for it being made into a funny movie evaporated once Brian Robbins signed on to direct. Brian Robbins, the man who made Norbit, the reference standard for the word "unwatchable", a movie so bad angels weep whenever its shown on cable.
Given Robbins' inability to competently stage even the simplest gag or build any kind of comedic rhythm, he could make any script look bad. No, I don't think Corbett's original premise--tiny aliens on board a spaceship designed to look like a human, or some damn thing--is particularly funny, but if this script had been filmed by, say, Joe Dante, it probably would have been gold. Dante would have probably maximized the weirdness of the premise while also punching up the characterizations. Robbins is the kind of guy who'll resort to someone getting kicked in the nuts whenever inspiration fails.
This is probably more time and space than needs to be devoted to Meet Dave, but I'll probably have more to say about the creative process as practiced by present-day Hollywood soon. Hey, would you rather I offer up more Star Wars analogies?
