Murphy's spaceship spoof lands with a loud thud

Eddie Murphy plays a spaceship and its tiny captain in "Meet Dave." (20th century fox)

In "Meet Dave," Eddie Murphy doesn't sound like himself. He sounds like Tina Turner accepting all her 1985 Grammys - a post-colonial Caribbean queen. He wears a three-piece suit as white as Ryan Seacrest's teeth, and the skin on his ageless face is milky but tight like the top layer on a cup of pudding. He's either required to stand with his eyes abug or make sudden, robotically stiff gestures. Murphy is supposed to be playing Dave Ming Chang, a spaceship controlled by microscopic humans, but he looks like an escapee from Madame Tussauds.

An hour in a wax museum would provide a slightly better time than this movie, which has Murphy also playing the tiny captain controlling his human-size self from a control deck in the spaceship's head. It's mostly harmless. It's also entirely dumb, as dumb as anyone could hope a movie that ends with a flying wingtip shoe to be. The plot has the captain and his crew in New York City looking for an orb to save their distant planet. It's "WALL-E" for nincompoops, and somehow Elizabeth Banks, Scott Caan, and Caan's radioactive-looking tan get mixed up in it.

Surrounded by a mixed-nuts crew (Judah Friedlander from "30 Rock," Ed Helms from "The Office," and Gabrielle Union from "Tyler Perry's Daddy's Little Girls") Murphy tries to keep the worship-bee comedians from stealing his show. But things on that space bridge seem like "Star Trek: The Public Access Years." If Helms wants to stuff that under his shirt, Murphy should probably let him.

But he can't say no to any of the gags in this movie, not even the one that requires him - as the well-dressed spaceship - to drink a bottle of ketchup or another in which he backs out of a room like Mork might have done to Mindy. The movie has giant toy sets meant to represent the stations in Dave's body. Friedlander, for instance, handles the buttocks, so when money rains from between Dave's legs, it presumably is he who's released the valve.

The director Brian Robbins oversaw Murphy's criminal offenses in last year's "Norbit," and exhibits even less wit here. He's encouraged the actors manning the mouth regions to slip and slosh around, grabbing the big molars like they're on a Universal Studios ride: Honey, I Shrunk My Dignity. The movie has the amateurish earnestness of a school play and the sad overnight construction of certain science projects. The special effects here may as well be done by Mattel.

There's a tremendous possibility that Murphy has no friends. What kind of pal would let the star of "Pluto Nash" near another science-fiction comedy? It's as if he and Mike Myers are in a race to see whose ingenuity can run more flagrantly aground until the next "Shrek" picture comes along. To be fair to Murphy, "Meet Dave" is no "Love Guru." He's not trying nearly as hard as Myers was, so the movie is scarcely as excruciating. On just about every occasion in "Meet Dave," Murphy appears to be on the verge of cracking himself up. This is good news. At least someone found him funny.