Dragonball Evolution
Japanophiles the world over were looking forward to a live-action adaptation of Dragonball, one of the highest-selling mangas of the 1980s and 1990s. But director James Wong (who has little more than two Final Destination movies under his belt) has managed to create one of the most hilariously awful films since Gigli. Amateurish acting and kindergartenesque dialogue are not particularly novel features of the action genre (although they are especially bad here), but incredibly short fighting sequences and awful cinematography pervade what is supposed to be a glitzy Hollywood summer blockbuster. The laughable CGI doesn’t help either. There’s a remote possibility that fans of the original series will find this a guilty pleasure, but people who can’t abide so-bad-it’s-good cinema will feel relieved by the mercifully short runtime. — Shain Germaner
Fast and Furious
The screeching of tyres, the blare of hooters, the risky manoeuvres, the wild look in the eyes of drivers — well, that was the drive to the preview of this film. The movie itself is more artfully shot than reality. For the fourth outing of the franchise, original stars Vin Diesel and Paul Walker return, the definite articles are dropped, and — it all seems pretty routine. Diesel is the highway robber with a good heart and a vendetta against a drug kingpin; Walker is the renegade cop seeking the same criminal. Their common search for this person means they have to reach an accommodation and must drive various cars very fast, through the city or through tunnels on the United States-Mexican border. There’s a range of scantily clad babes for non-automotive decoration, but neither male star takes his shirt off, which makes this pretty pointless. — Shaun de Waal