Dragon Wars fought for naught

September 17, 2007 —

If I only saw the first 30 seconds and the last five minutes of Dragon Wars, I'd be inclined to award it five stars. Unfortunately, the 100 minutes or so in the middle is probably the worst thing to hit theatres in the last six months.

It's always amazing when a movie like Dragon Wars comes along. Who could possibly have created such a travesty? Did it at one point resemble something like cinema? If so, how many tears fell from the creator's eyes when he realized what had happened to his baby?

There's no way to make the plot or anything else about the movie sound good, but the general idea is that a reporter named Ethan (Jason Behr) is the second coming of a warrior destined to defend a woman who has some sort of thing inside her that will enter one of two serpents, good or bad, which will then either make things, well, good or bad for the world. Whew.

To explain the background to this story, Dragon Wars breaks away from present happenings to show a good twenty minutes of what happened 500 years ago. Already at this point the movie is jumbled and unwieldy, a simplistic plot made confusing through poor planning,

Excluding the neat opening graphics, every scene for the first hour of this movie made me laugh. The most ridiculous things, rendered in the cheapest looking ways, happen over and over again. A futuristic Power Rangers-esque army, replete with dinosaurs, assaults a sixteenth century Korean village. An old man wearing a leather duster and carrying a plastic sword electrocutes Darryl from The Office before being hit by the second of two cars. I'm not kidding.

I don't blame the acting, because there's just not much for the actors to work with. Craig Robinson (the aforementioned member of The Office) even gets some laughs in the opening scenes. And as I mentioned, the last few minutes are pretty good. There's a picturesque quality to it that reminded me, in style rather than setting, of the end of the excellent House of Flying Daggers. However, it's a bad sign when the only good thing that can be said about a movie is that it has a nice ending.

The editing is a joke. Spastic jumps from outrageous scene to outrageous scene, interspersed with completely unrelated shots lasting from 10 to 20 seconds all add up to one big mess. Combine that with the absurdity of what is happening onscreen in each and every one of these short, choppy scenes, and the result is a movie that would actually be more artistically successful if marketed as a comedy.

The problem is when things are as messy as this movie is, and the visuals are as bad as they are during most of the feature, and there is no decent plot or even character development to work with, it becomes impossible to care about anything that happens on the screen. This is the kind of movie where it doesn't matter to me if any of the characters live or die, because there are no characters worth being attached to.

And I couldn't get over the Power Rangers-style evil army. I mean, that's just stupid. The computer-generated graphics showing these guys make the hideous stormtrooper clone army from Star Wars: Episode II look like a work of genius.

Plus, it seems like in a movie titled Dragon Wars, the audience would at least get to see more than the two minutes of dragon screen time at the end. And don't think of that as spoiling the movie for you. Think of it as me saving you from the movie.

I remembered seeing there were two cuts of Dragon Wars, one 107 minutes and the other 89. I assumed by the flow that the American release is the shorter of the two, but woefully discovered that we in fact are privy to the longer one. If things are this choppy and insane at 107 minutes, my prayers go out to those subjected to the cut version.