The really sad thing about Meet Dave is that it’s by no means the worst film that Eddie Murphy has made. This is no excruciating Norbit, no witless Pluto Nash. And although Murphy does pull his usual trick of playing multiple characters (mercifully just two this time), at least he has temporarily done away with the fat suit. But his demeanour is joyless; his comic timing misjudged. It’s depressing to see a once-great talent sulkily slinging away his lines as if he just can’t wait to cash his latest cheque.

In Meet Dave Murphy plays a humanoid-shaped spaceship, a disco-suited intergalactic vessel that crashes at the feet of the Statue of Liberty. “Dave” picks “himself” up and, each limb twitching with its own mechanical palsy, makes his way into Manhattan. Inside Dave, operating his every function, is a team of tiny, highly trained, seemingly humourless aliens led by the Captain (Murphy again). The Captain’s mission is to find a missing meteorite the size of a golf ball that will save his planet but destroy Earth in the process.

Dave’s first encounters with humankind are not auspicious. He creepily and unfunnily mimics the behaviour of passing strangers, bearing his teeth in a pained approximation of a smile. It’s the kind of behaviour that would get him Tasered within minutes in the real US, but this is New York Hollywood-style, where widowed single mothers invite odd and probably dangerous strangers into their family, and where aliens bent on destruction learn life-affirming lessons in a salsa club. It’s a plodding, workmanlike movie from the director Brian Robbins. The writing is somnambulistic but even if there were jokes that didn’t feel half cooked, Murphy’s obvious lack of interest would soon deflate them.

PG, 90 minutes

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