You know you’ve seen too many bad talking animal movies when you start to cherish the ones that are merely passable. Nothing all that special, not all that particularly entertaining, but at least it isn’t a total trainwreck to sit through. That itself is quite surprising, coming from a film that the marketing is desperately trying to convince is on par with How To Train Your Dragon, made by a director whose only past credits are with sideways-glancing nature mockumentaries, and a writer who helped unleash The Queen’s Corgi on an unsuspecting public. And yet, all three of those preconceptions do add up to why this film turns out as purely average as it is.
For a start, in a rather shocking turn of events, the store-brand marketing for the film isn’t just an attempt to cash in on a much better franchise, as the film proper takes some time out to poke fun at the publicity said film has garnered (through a proxy with How To Tame Your Dragon by FireWorks Animation), and there’s a few sight-gag references to other Dreamworks fare like a sudden appearance from one of Madagascar’s penguins, and even from third-party studios like a Scrat-like squirrel shown frozen in ice. It sets itself up as something of a send-up to the bigger names, with the How To Tame Your Dragon bit actually providing a plot point for the teaming-up of the titular ‘Dragon Rider’ (in reality a thief voiced by Freddie Highmore), the dragon Firedrake (Thomas Brodie-Sangster, or Newt from The Maze Runner series) and forest brownie Sorrel (Felicity Jones).
It helps that the animation, while not exactly setting the world on blue fire, is mainly competent and offers some decent visuals. The character designs range from the alright (Highmore’s Ben and basically every other human here) to the strangely familiar (if the main villain Nettlebrand wasn’t in some way inspired by Robot Man from Doom Patrol, I’d be very surprised), the flying scenes show that the filmmakers at least understand what made the HTTYD movies so engaging, and the many, many different locales we see are all well-detailed and give the world this story sits in a certain breadth of scope.
Of course, that last point also adds to why this film can be rather underwhelming: It’s an adventure story with no real through line connecting each stop other than “we must reach the discount Hidden World… I mean ‘Rim Of Heaven’”. We go from the land of the dragons, to modern-day urbia (with Firedrake and Sorrel initially seeking out an oracle called ‘The Internet’, which is never followed up on), to an underground tomb in the desert, to one of the more stereotypical Indian villages I’ve seen on film, and so on. There isn’t so much of a plot as much as things happens and places are visited, with the narrative taking on a consistent stop-start pacing that feels like it’s never able to get itself out of park, let alone get where it needs to be in a timely fashion. Then again, it really doesn’t need to be anywhere at all; it’s just taking up time.
While there’s a couple of fun moments, like when Nettlebrand’s minion is about to break into song but is instead thrown across the room to shut him up, or an encounter with a Djinn that takes a different approach to most other inclusions I’ve seen of late, or just the perplexing decision to make Nettlebrand joining a dating website into a recurring and important plot point, it’s ultimately too aimless to recommend too emphatically. It presents heaps of opportunities for story ideas, like the meeting of old fantasy and newfangled technology or generally taking the piss out of Dreamworks, but never ends up doing anything with them, and the story on its own isn’t nearly interesting or even thought-out enough to make up for that.
It’s passable in as far as I can see a family watching this together and the adults not feeling too embarrassed for having to sit through it, but beyond that… honestly, this whole film feels like a lead-up to one of those “We have ____ at home” memes. Except you can get How To Train Your Dragon on home streaming, so why even bother with this at all?
No comments:
Post a Comment