Comedy has evolved into something new, something strange, something totally and completely unfunny. From Ivan Reitman comes "Evolution", a comedy without jokes is a sad thing indeed.
Evolution stars David Duchovny and Orlando Jones as a pair of community college science teachers who make the discovery of a lifetime. Aliens have landed on earth and are evolving to wipe mankind out. As usual, the army steps in and bungles things up, leaving our dimwitted heroes to battle the beastly baddies with shotguns and shampoo... which as it turns out is infinitely less funny than it sounds.
You see, Evolution makes the same mistake a lot of comedies seem to be making these days... its not funny. Not even a little bit. Somewhere along the way, comedic writers decided to substitute grossness for humor. At first this sort of gross out humor was combined with crack up jokes and biting wit, to great effect. But over time, the jokes have sort of dropped out of the formula, leaving us with only the grossness and without any laughs. Evolution spends so much time racing around from boring locale to boring locale attempting to tell some sort of Independence Day type story that it forgets to stop and laugh a little. Missing is the intrepid wackiness and goofiness of Ghostbuster, the film after which this one was so clearly modeled.
Evolution is Ghostbuster without the jokes. David Duchovny is Spengler without a personality, Orlando Jones is Bill Murray with a hangover, and this movie is an insult to my funnybone. It has all intelligence of a bad Ed Wood film combined with all the seriousness and grandstanding of Independence Day. It takes a serious amount of effort to make a shampoo enima boring, but Reitman and Co. spare no expense in anesthetizing Evolution of any lingering humor..
Reitman took this film, grabbed it by the balls, bashed it in the head, sucked all the life out of it, and replaced it with a cheesy Mexican knockoff. Duchovny's acting career is dead, Orlando Jones career is dead, Julianne Moore should be ashamed, and Dan Akyroyd... well he's just doing what he always does, bad movies.
