Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Evolution

Movie Guru Rating:
Bad Karma (2 out of 5)

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David Duchovny downwardly evolves from The X-Files in Evolution

by Chris Neal

David Duchovny all but abandoned his role on The X-Files last year, leaving Files fans like me to watch the show slowly begin circling the drain, robbed of its central character, the compelling Mulder-Scully relationship, and its raison d'�tre: the show had always been about Mulder's quest for the truth, and lately it's been about...what? I have no idea anymore.

And why did Duchovny put us long-suffering X-Philes through this? Why, to concentrate on his film career, of course. But while co-star Gillian Anderson—still burdened with FBI duty—managed a stunning, utterly non-Scully turn in House of Mirth, Duchovny was filling his now-open schedule by playing a deadpan smart-guy who discovers, then fights against an imminent alien invasion—despite the non-cooperation of the military and local government—while paired with a pretty doctor who happens to be a redhead. Sound familiar?

Yep, it turns out Duchovny gave up playing Mulder to pretty much play Mulder—except this isn't The X-Files, it's director Ivan Reitman's sci-fi comedy Evolution. Duchovny is community-college biology professor Ira Kane, who discerns that a just-fallen meteor in the New Mexico desert contains extraterrestrial life forms—one-celled organisms that are reproducing at an alarming rate. Before long, of course, the government intervenes and Kane is shut out. ("No government," Duchovny warns early on. "I know those people." Har de har, Agent Mulder.) By the time the aliens are big enough to start eating the locals, the military is hard-headedly mishandling the entire affair. Why? Because that's what the military does in every alien-invasion movie, that's why. They're led by General Woodman, who lets everyone know that Kane is a former Pentagon employee himself, before a botched anthrax vaccine got him tossed. In the alien crisis, Kane spots a primo opportunity to redeem himself.

Along for the ride as he attempts to do so are geologist—and women's volleyball coach—Harry Block (7-Up pitchman Orlando Jones), wannabe firefighter Wayne Green (Seann William Scott of American Pie semi-fame) and CDC scientist Allison Reed (Julianne Moore). Jones and Duchovny make a nice team, effortlessly enlivening the often-arbitrary machinations of the screenplay (credited to Don Jakoby, David Diamond and David Weissman); their interplay makes it easy to believe these characters are old friends, and it's a pleasure to watch them just be. Jones, unfortunately, is made to bear the brunt of the movie's regular side-trips into scatology—although admittedly, his overwhelming horror at being made to endure an emergency proctological procedure to extricate an invading alien is one of the movie's funniest moments.

Evolution represents a gear-grinding change of pace for two-time Oscar nominee Moore, last seen in the rather more grim Hannibal. Mind you, the plot would be absolutely no different without her character, whose only purpose is to provide a love interest for Duchovny and get a few cheap laughs for her clumsiness (a running gag that is eventually forgotten). Still, Moore's sunny sexiness and humming intelligence (she's the only actor here who's immediately believable as a scientist) add immeasurably to Evolution's appeal, and she seems happy to relax and be goofy. Elsewhere in the cast, Dan Aykroyd turns up for some unfunny blustering as the governor, and eternally-underused ex-SNL-er Sarah Silverman has a brief turn as Kane's ex.

The aliens themselves are intermittently interesting, as Jurassic Park visual-effects whiz Phil Tippett conjures an endless, colorful variety of fanged, horned, and otherwise lethal interstellar monsters. Too bad the actors so often get caught obviously looking at the empty space where computer-generated aliens will be added later.

Blame for that, and for most of Evolution's problems, must fall to Reitman, who seems locked in a career spiral not unlike that of his Animal House partner John Landis: a sorry succession of diminishing returns and half-hearted attempts to recapture former glory.

Reitman plunders his Ghostbusters formula so thoroughly here, and to such paltry effect, that it's embarrassing. His deft balancing of comedy and sci-fi elements, so surehanded 17 years ago, never quite gels here—one second, a huge alien is killing dozens of people, the next there's another juvenile gag. And with all the rectally-minded humor here, it's hard to avoid the appearance that Reitman is jumping on the gross-out comedy gravy train—it's a long way from covering Bill Murray in slime to shoving Orlando Jones up an alien's ass. That's not evolution, baby—that's a shame.

As for Duchovny, his big-screen career is going to have to produce something really dazzling, really fast, or...well, does the name David Caruso ring a bell?