Murphy shrinks self, laughs in ‘Meet Dave’

The best that can be said about Eddie Murphy’s “Meet Dave” is that it’s neither as catastrophically bad as “The Adventures of Pluto Nash” or as crass as “Norbit.”

That doesn’t mean Murphy has any right to crow. “Meet Dave” is a high concept farce aimed at the lowest common denominator. Namely, tykes who don’t mind when movies talk down to them.

Murphy plays a tiny alien who visits Earth in order to find a lost device meant to suck the salt out of the planet’s oceans. His own planet needs that salt to survive, although we’re told the salt-sucking gadget will kill all life remaining on Earth. Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, right?

The alien’s spaceship, which carries a team of similarly small humanoids, is a human-sized representation of Murphy’s character, the ship’s captain. That means the ship looks like … Eddie Murphy in a white suit stolen from “Saturday Night Fever’s” wardrobe dept.

It’s up to “Dave,” a name the spaceship gives itself via Murphy’s captain character, to blend into his new surroundings while hunting down the missing device. Helping him out is Gina (an utterly wasted Elizabeth Banks), a single mom whose life gets tangled up with that of the clueless Dave.

Just describing the story and all its accompanying parts is exhausting, and there’s precious few laughs to make it worth the effort. Murphy’s physical shtick amounts to little here, and his overworked grin is more creepy than charming. That’s not a good trend for the former box office titan.

Kids will get chuckle at the sillier moments, like Dave’s security chief who goes all squishy when exposed to our planet’s dance music.

Everyone else will wonder when the real Eddie Murphy, the firebrand who lit up everything from “48 Hours” to “Coming to America,” will show up on movie screens again.