Subject: REVIEW: DRAGONHEART (1996)

From: [email-masked] (Mark R. Leeper)
Date: 4 Jun 1996 13:08:00 GMT

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
					[email-masked]