Here's a review I found:
Some cynics may expect the worst of another Eddie Murphy vehicle involving extraterrestrials -- insert joke about "The Adventures of Pluto Nash" here -- but that only makes "Meet Dave" all the more pleasant a surprise. Aimed squarely at the same family audiences that flocked to Murphy's "Doctor Dolittle" comedies, this lightly amusing and surprisingly sweet Fox release should score midrange summer B.O. numbers, despite competition from other kidpics in theatrical circulation, and later enjoy a long shelf life as homevid fare.
Dave Ming Chang (Murphy) is a man who falls to Earth and winds up wandering the streets of Manhattan. Decked out in a disco-era white suit, and proceeding with the stiff, sudden movements of a disoriented stork, Dave appears to be the epitome of a fish out of water. But that's only because he really isn't a man at all.
Rather, Dave is a spacecraft, meticulously constructed in the image of its tiny Captain (also Murphy), and filled with an entire crew of similarly miniscule space invaders. These strange visitors from the planet Nil arrive with only spotty and largely outdated ideas about Earth language and customs. (The white suit? Blame it on the only TV rerun ever to reach Nil.) They're by turns confused and intrigued by the oddities they encounter -- why, for example, do Earthlings amass vast repositories of vital information, then give these invaluable resources such silly names as Google and Yahoo?
But the Captain and his loyal No. 3 (Gabrielle Union, radiant as always) must do a little Googling of their own to complete their mission: finding a missing baseball-sized device that will do something good for their home planet and something very bad to the oceans on Earth. The hunt leads Dave to Gina (Elizabeth Banks), a pretty single mom, and her young son, Josh (Austyn Lind Myers), a bullied grade-schooler in need of a father figure.
"Meet Dave" works best when the f/x trickery is used sparingly, and Murphy himself is allowed to shine as the pic's most special effect. His gracefully awkward body language in Dave's early scenes recalls Steve Martin's herky-jerky hilarity as the spiritually possessed lawyer in "All of Me."
But even after the man-shaped spaceship adapts to ambulating, Murphy remains amusing as Dave does his best to mimic the expressions and understand the language of Earthlings. Just his attempts to match the smiles of various other characters will be enough to get audiences laughing.
Murphy works in a lower key, but to good effect, as the Captain, a vaguely Brit-accented commander who's too busy to notice No. 3's romantic overtures. Love blooms only after they and other Nillians aboard Spaceship Dave are "infected" by the emotional and psychological characteristics of Earthlings. (As a security officer who gets in touch with his inner queen, Pat Kilbane takes the sting out of a swishy caricature through sheer force of uproarious overplaying.)
"Meet Dave" hits a speed bump in the third act when a humorless No. 2 (Ed Helms) wrestles command away from the Captain, leading to a sequence that involves bright lights, loud explosions and f/x flash. It seems entirely out of keeping with the rest of the pic, but fortunately, it doesn't last long.
Production values are first-rate. But "Meet Dave" demonstrates the benefits of emphasizing a human touch over hardware when it comes to funny business.
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