2 out of 10
 

Are we all truly descendents of Hydro Quebec Call Centre staff? And did the earth`s primeval oceans a few 100 million trips around the Sun really puke onto a rocky shore this putrid slime, panting in the heavy air whilst it`s primative eyes frantically scanned the empty, bare horizon for a telephone from which to insult and abuse innocent electricity users with all the ignorant crud in its single cell brain could muster? Many people believe it impossible for mother nature to have created anything as complex as life (or as simple as the Hydro Quebec Call Centre staff) by pure chance and some have suggested that, maybe the spark of life came onboard a meteor from the skies, plunging into earth`s sterile crust. Clearly this is the inspiration behind the film "Evolution", not only as it asks what would happen if this occured again, but also because this comedy is about as talentless, crude and humourless as the staff at Hydro Quebec`s Call Centre.

The film has been churned out by largely the same production people that brought the world "Ghostbusters", and it shows! Not only does it seem as if someone merely loaded the Ghostbusters script into MS Word for Windows and simply globally substituted "G-H-O-S-T" for "A-L-I-E-N", but even Dan Ackroyd turns up briefly as the State Governor, the sort of stupid, meddlesome, heavy handed bureaucratic jerk his character was fighting against in Ghostbusters, yet here he adds only another fat slab of overacting to the existing tonnage weighing down the film.

With the alien slime evolving in days rather than millions of years, they pose a rapidly growing threat to mankind (unlike Hydro Quebec where the Call Centre staff pose a threat to normal people`s sanity exactly because they remain the same buckets of slime they`ve always been). As Ira, the Biology teacher who realises this manace, David Duchovny sets out to fight this menace - one here has to note it`s a pity he didn`t do the same with the film which might have helped protect the paying public`s wallets otherwise.

With a one dimensional plot and David Duchovny clearly not informed at the time of filming that he was not playing Fox Mulder in a serious episode of the X-Files, but was actually now in a comedy, it`s up to the supporting cast to drill out the few laughs this film produces, with crude slapstick and toilet humour. Even so, I have to admit that Julianne Moore was extraordinarily good as Alison Reed, Ira`s super-clumsy ex-girlfriend and ex-boss geek, managing innumerable, inopportune falls and trips throughout the film that really were astoundingly realistic. Backing up these two were Orlando Jones, who seems to strive to make a career out of being the bemused and confused token black guy, as a Geology lecturer and Seann William Scott as Wayne Green, the eternal stupid klutz from films such as "Dude Where`s My Car" and "American Pie" as a reject from the fire brigade whose car is rather amusingly destroyed by the meteor in the opening scene.

Blocked at every corner it seems by General Woodman, a character where they had Ted Levine standing in for a real actor, the team finally come up with an ingenious plan by which to achieve the victory they were so obviously going to win from the start of reel one, leaving it up to the tea boy to write the end with the help of the last pages of a dusty copy of the Ghostbusters script and a bottle of snowpake.