DRAGONHEART
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1996 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: DRAGONHEART is an uneven high fantasy
with a few bad ideas but also some very majestic
scenes. Its major flaw is to build the dragon too
much around Sean Connery's looks and mannerisms and
to use topical humor that spoils much of the
fantasy atmosphere. DRAGONHEART seems aimed at a
younger set, but there are also enough very nice
ideas in the film and a sufficiently created world
to make this a film watchable by adults. Rating:
+2 (-4 to +4)
Some of my best friends do not understand why I am an admirer of the film DRAGONSLAYER. I am not as a rule a reader of fantasy and when I am culling my collection of books, the books that have dragons on the covers seem to be among the first candidates to go. Dragons have been almost as over-used in fantasy novels as vampire have been in horror novels. Yet though I am not a fan of dragon stories, still I found myself totally floored by DRAGONSLAYER for some of the plot turns, many of the touches in the script, and especially for Vermithrax Pejorative, the most magnificent dragon ever portrayed on the screen. It is difficult to just put wings on a something that just looks like a dinosaur or a serpent and expect that it will seem like something that could fly. Yet it just takes one look at Vermithrax Pejorative to know that she was meant to soar in the air and not walk on the ground. But as much as I liked DRAGONSLAYER, I knew few people had my admiration for that film. At least I thought they did not until I saw the trailers for DRAGONHEART. They did not show a lot of the dragon, but what I could see reminded me of DRAGONSLAYER and made it look like it could almost be a sequel. Sadly, DRAGONHEART is not the follow-up film I would have wanted, but it does have some moderately sophisticated fantasy ideas and its dragon is a nice construction, if not as aerodynamic as old Vermithrax Pejorative. In fact, one really doubts that DRAGONHEART's dragon really would be able to fly.
In this film dragons are an old race that is dying out in large part for having been killed off by humans. That seems particularly short-sighted on the part of the humans since the dragons, we are told, are mystical creatures who for some unexplained reason love humans and want them to prosper and be happy. They seem to be perfectly happy to forgive humans for wiping out their race. DRAGONHEART is the story of the friendship between the last dragon left in the world (voiced by Sean Connery) and the knight and dragonslayer Bowen (played by Dennis Quaid), the man who killed the second-to-last dragon. Draco, as the dragon is nicknamed--we are almost but not quite told his real name, bears no animosity toward Bowen for being responsible for the death of the last few of his species. Draco just wants Bowen to help him stand up for humans. If this seems a little saccharine, well, this is no DRAGONSLAYER. But I am getting ahead of myself. As the story opens Bowen is the teacher of Einon (Lee Oakes as a boy, David Thewlis as a man). Einon is the son of a powerful tyrant king, and he is killed in a peasant uprising. Einon's mother, Aislinn (Julie Christie, in entirely too much makeup for 984 A.D.), takes the dead boy to a local dragon who performs a mystical operation somehow wedding the bodies of the dragon and the boy. The operation is a success, but the boy is almost immediately seduced by the dark side of his own power. Bowen is angered at what the dragon has done to Einon and goes off in search of dragons to slay. Twelve years later (or just exactly one millennium ago) Einon has become a worse tyrant than his father and the dragonslayer Bowen comes upon the dragon he will come to call Draco. After a rocky start the two become fast friends.
The initial conceit of having a dragon not just sound like Sean Connery, but also have the mannerisms and even look a bit like him is one of the biggest mistakes in the making of this film. Certainly it will add to the box-office appeal of the film, but it robs the dragon of much of his mystical appeal and his credibility on the screen. Granted, Connery is a better choice on which to base a dragon than, say, Rodney Dangerfield. But fantasy works best when one can suspend disbelief and put oneself into its world. The casting of Connery as dragon is too much of a reminder that we cannot take all this literally. Some of the humor really tests our suspension of disbelief. There is a comic dig at President Clinton, there are at least two crotch jokes, there is a joke stolen from the "Wizard of Id" comic strip. But those are the bad touches. Much of the script by Charles Edward Pogue is intriguing as the dragon becomes a major character in the story. His code forces him to be an ally to some humans, notably the down-trodden, some of whom are responsible for the killing off of his species. And yet his closest ties are with his worst enemy. He is not a monster, but more an erudite person. Perhaps he is more close in behavior and attitudes to Chinese dragons than to the fearsome creatures of European lore. Incidentally a look at the closing credits indicates that much of the production was done in Eastern Europe, particularly Slovakia, and that is a part of the world where dragon lore is both popular and a local tradition. A traveler in Eastern Europe quickly loses count of the number of artistic renditions seen of St. George and the Dragon, and one rather suspects that the reason is not because people have a fascination with St. George. The plot calls upon a number of high-fantasy traditions and even has a short speech by King Arthur voiced, if I am not mistaken, by an uncredited John Gielgud.
Dennis Quaid is starting to show his age, but does passably well as Bowen even if his accent is a bit uneven. Connery hams it up a little as the dragon, but that is perhaps what is necessary to render him so delightfully in to the form of the great beast. Pete Postlethwaite give a rare, overdone performance as a comic relief man of the cloth who fancies himself a poet. On the other hand David Thewlis (of NAKED, BLACK BEAUTY, and RESTORATION) could have put a little more oomph into his villain. Coincidentally, Postlethwaite and Thewlis both had parts in the recent JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH. Director Rob Cohen previously directed DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY, and directed the upcoming DAYLIGHT which had a trailer at the showing of DRAGONHEART.
Rather than a fantasy that would work well for all ages, this turns out to be a juvenile, but one good enough that adults can enjoy it--which is not quite the same thing. I rate it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews