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Review:
 The
true test of a bad movie is its premise. If it completely botches
a wonderful premise, then the film is worse than a lousy film with
a lousy premise.
This is what Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka and Matt Greenberg
have managed to do with their useless script. It’s awful! Truly
awful.
The film begins brilliantly, with young Quinn Abercromby(Ben
Thornton) coming home from school and visiting his mother(Alice
Krige), an engineer, down in a large tunnel where they’re
repairing the City of London’s subway system. He’s got problems,
and she’s got problems. Great. But then one of Mom’s coworkers
decides to ask Quinn to look inside an unexpected "empty space"
and our hero accidentally wakes up a fire-breathing dragon, who’s
been there since late antiquity.
The beast breaks out of it’s cocoon, and Quinn, but not his
mother make it out alive. Now this is cool. One absurd thing is
okay if everything else is logically constructed around it. But
no, it’s not, and what’s worse is that it’s not what’s advertised
in the trailer, either.
For the next five minutes, we are taken on a tour of the first
fifth of the 21st century, where the dragon has multiplied in only
a couple of years from one to millions, and they’ve destroyed the
world as we know it. Only a few people are alive by the year 2020.
One of them is our friend Quinn, now played by a bearded Christian
Bale. He’s running a colony in the north of England, and they’re
now eking out a living a la "Mad Max." Quinn and his motley band
are beginning to fall apart, and all seems lost. But then….
The Marines show up!!!! Yes, the US Marines, or what’s left of
them. With tanks and a helicopter. This is the sort of thing that
the British will despise. They’re still angry enough that we
sometimes remind them of how we saved their asses in 1917 and
1941, but our doing it again is just not nice, especially as the
tabloids over there have been ragging at Prime Minister Blair for
not abandoning us in our hour of need last fall.
But here they come, lead by Denton Van Zan (an unrecognizable
Matthew McConaughey), who’s totally psycho and hates dragons with
a passion. They, with a little help from Quinn, save the colony
from a dragon attack, and then go off in a huff, taking a few
"draftees" with them.
The action sequences are okay, but there are so many plot holes
that the whole thing is ruined from the end of the bridge
sequence. The damned thing is too predictable. We know that Van
Zan, Quinn, and the beauteous helicopter pilot(Izabella Scorupco)
are going to fight the King dragon. The victory over the forces of
evil isn’t nearly as satisfying is it should have been. The reason
is because it’s all so gratuitous.
If you’re going to see this anyway, use illegal intoxicants
first. It’ll make the whole thing painless
Eric Lurio
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