REIGN OF FIRE (2002) Dragons done right, movie done wrong Dragons! And lots of 'em! And they don't talk and they're not goddamn friendly. How can any movie with such a concept fail? Well, Reign Of Fire does, and it doesn't. It's got the right look, and the right dragons, but predictably, a total McMovie plot. It's also got an awful lot of that sneering "We saved your ass in World War II!" attitude for a movie filmed Ireland and set in England. Some deep-down subterranean dig under London unleashes a still very much alive giant dragon, and the next thing you know, the whole planet's getting scorched by fire-breathers from the sky. Humanity's hanging on by a thread, and one isolated colony of Brits, led by Christian Bale, are trying to make a life for themselves living in some blasted ruins, likeably shot as a grey-and-grim post-urban waste. It doesn't occur to them that since London is Dragon Central, maybe they should get out of England and go somewhere like...well, anywhere but England. Where there's life, there's hope, but hope keeps dwindling because people keep getting burned and/or eaten. The arrival of a battalion of grungy Americans, led by Matthew McConaughey (looking an awful lot like Kerry King here), introduces them to a new way of battling the beasts - from the sky! One thing it definitely does right is in the dragons themselves. They're big, vicious, and they don't talk. They're not nice to ANYBODY, not even each other. One scene has the giant male dragon chomping one of the smaller ones. (the cast speculates that it's because he's really hungry, and this is never refuted...I think the movie misses a The Legacy Of Heorot-style opportunity by not suggesting that maybe he was nipping his competition in the bud) The dragon design is the kind where they don't have arms independent of their wings. I prefer the kind that does have them, mostly because for some reason I can't explain, I've always considered this no-armed kind of dragon to be a wyvern. The dragon action is all pretty kick-ass, and whenever a dragon was onscreen, I forgot all about how silly the movie is. The method by which dragons are fought from the sky is creative and goofily thrilling, but if I recall correctly, we're never shown this process pulled off successfully. Though the dragons look great, their biology and ecology isn't very well thought out. They reproduce like fish, somebody says, with eggs lying around and the male just kinda fertilizing whatever's in his path. So, what, have the eggs been sitting around for dozens of millions of years ("they burned the dinosaurs to ashes") in the open, where just anybody flying by can squirt on them? Man, I wouldn't want to be examining those eggs that day without an umbrella. Sure, nobody SAYS "We saved your ass in World War II!" but you just know they're thinking it. McConaughey's bald, bearded dragonslayer is less Braveheart than Captain Ahab, which might be a cool character decision in a more well-written movie, but isn't here. Everybody seems bitter and cranky all the time, not that I blame them (their lives kind of suck), but it makes them a lot less fun to watch and listen to for a hundred minutes. Reign Of Fire, is like a lot of big-budget movies, with a great concept, good action and good special effects...and little logic, lame (though sparse) dialogue, and a slumming cast with such personality-less roles that McConaughey actually ends up the sole standout (see also Dolph Lundgren in Johnny Mnemonic). But then, it also features one of the more amusing Star Wars homages I've seen. I can't bring myself to really pan this movie. A lot of it gives me that warm n' fuzzy feeling. Directed by Rob Bowman, who gave us that X-Files movie. BACK TO THE R's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE