I know, I know. I’d rather write about another Starship Troopers movie myself. Hell, even writing about a feature-length episode of the CGI TV show would be preferable. But you go to press with the releases you’ve got, and this one is all about the Godforsaken Starship Dave, Eddie Murphy’s next film with Norbit director and critic-hater Brian Robbins. The concept is that a bunch of human-looking micro aliens pilot a craft that happens to take the form of a human that happens to look exactly like the captain or, if you don’t care to even begin pondering how stupid that seems, Eddie is basically doing Herman’s Head: The Movie, with lots of little people controlling him from inside his head instead of just four.
Since worldwide latex production is only but so capable, they decided to eschew the strategy of letting him play every role, and add some other humans to the cast. The Office/The Daily Show guy Ed Helms has just signed on to be the second-in-command officer, and Gabrielle Union will play some other crew member. While you might think she’d be a love interest, too, that’s not gonna happen due to the one genuine curveball this production has to offer.
Eddie’s love interest is going to be played by Elizabeth Banks.
Now, granted this is a broad-aiming, lowest common denominator comedy, so it’s not like we’re going to see what sex with a starship is like (that really should be left for other films to explore. Lots of other films, in fact), but I don’t see there being even an iota of chemistry between the two. At the very least, it does fly in the current orthodoxy of making sure that in black male leads are paired opposite a non-black, but still ethnic choice like Eva Mendes or Rosario Dawson (who already served her sentence in The Adventures of Pluto Nash), and Banks is pretty good in whatever gets thrown at her, so she should stay afloat amidst the sea of mediocrity here. And it’s hard to argue with this as a career choice for any of the aforementioned given the seeming inevitability of its success if the studio follows the Norbit release formula.
Shooting starts in mere weeks. Try to wait for it.