Subject: REVIEW: DRAGONHEART (1996)

From: [email-masked] (Jonathan B. Hardison)
Date: 4 Jun 1996 13:07:40 GMT

DRAGONHEART
                       A film review by Jonathan B. Hardison
                        Copyright 1996 Jonathan B. Hardison

	All throughout Rob Cohen's picture, DRAGONHEART, I found myself 
trying to think of ways to make ASCII thumbs up/thumbs down symbols. 
Ultimately, out of sheer confusion, I gave up.

	DRAGONHEART is the story of a Young Prince who becomes King when his 
father is killed in a peasant revolt. Out of the prince's greed for the 
crown, he is actidentally mortally wounded by a young girl falling from a 
hut. In desperation to save the new King, his mother and this Teacher, 
Bowen (Dennis Quaid), take him to an old dragon, who revives the boy by 
giving him half of his heart. In this exchange, the dragon makes him swear 
not to be a tyrant like his father, which slightly resembles Bowen's 
teachings in the first five minutes of the film. When the boy grows up to 
be a tyrant, Bowen feels that the dragon polluted the boy with his evil 
heart, and sets out to kill all dragons in order to avenge his (for lack 
of a better term) "wonderful" teachings. Later, we also discover that the 
dragon is condemned to "dragon hell" because he gave life to such a 
tyrant (can't you tell I love saying "tyrant"?) Along the way the dragon 
befriends Bowen after a fight ending in a mental, if not physical 
stalemate; the young woman who wounded the prince initally wants revenge 
on the prince for the death of her father, and then on everyone else in 
the film for the same reason (even though she befriends Bowen); Bowen 
changes his loyalties from the Dragon to himself to King Arthur 
(Arthur??) multiple times; Bowen and the dragon (oh, by the way, did I 
fail to mention the voice of the Dragon in Sean Connery?) lead a peasant 
revolt (yes, again) agaist the prince; a poet/monk/scholar finds out he 
can shoot anyone in any embarassing place on the body with an arrow; and 
along the way we learn about the values of truth, loyalty, forgiveness, honor,  
religion, parental upbrining, good hygine, and cooking.

	Still with me? Good.

	And this is exactly what pulls down DRAGONHEART, the story. The 
writers tried to pack every shred of, well, everything into this movie. 
There are enough plot points in this film to feul the rest of the writers 
for three or four summers to come. The story is just so silly that we 
tend to forget about it halfway through and just concentrate on watching 
the Dragon, which is, of course, the point of this film.

	As for the dragon, the attention to detail and the improvements 
in CGI rendering (the same computer animation that brought us JURASSIC 
PARK) really come through in this film for an eyeful of a dragon. One 
scene with the dragon standing in the rain with water dripping off of 
him is technically stunning. Just so, the film turns out just to be a 
vehicle for the special effects and Sean Connery's humorous interpretaion 
of the dragon. Connery makes the dragon the only really likeable (or 
understandable) character in this film. Regardless of how bad the story 
is, the dragon is fun to watch.

	For this reason, I have to give DRAGONHEART a little better 
rating than it deserves. No ground is broken here in the acting or in the
directing (by Rob Cohen), but as a vehicle for a visually stunning 
dragon, this movie delivers. Of course, you could have made a film about 
people dusting teapots interesting by inserting a well executed computer 
generated dragon (interesting characters would do the same) Next 
time, a coherent plot and a couple of characters are in order, and I'll 
have mine Flambe'.

DRAGONHEART **1/2

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
**** = Excellent. One of a kind. Must see.
***  = Entertaining. Worth the price of admission.
**   = Fair. Nothing much special.
*    = What were they thinking??