Dragons are cool. This is a fact. Large, fire-breathing, flying, mythological reptiles are incredibly cool. And there are some incredibly cool CGI dragons in Reign of Fire. Unfortunately, after a good opening premise, the film doesn’t really seem to know what to do with them, and so we don’t get enough dragons. Which are, as I might have mentioned before, very cool. Reign of Fire sees the world taken over by dragons in a few short years after one is discovered in London. They populate exponentially, taking over the world, killing all living things in their path, which is what led them to die out in the first place, millennia ago when they first ruled the earth. Christian Bale is Quinn, the leader of a band of survivors in northern England, whose mother was killed when they were the first to discover the original dragon. Into this struggling group comes Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey), a testosterone-fuelled American soldier with his small army, boasting of his dragon-killing capabilities to Quinn, who only wishes to survive and keep his fellow survivors alive.
Reign of Fire is a slight piece of fun, but it doesn’t deliver fully on it’s intent of lots of dragons and over-the-top action. Yes, the dragons look good but, even though the world is full of dragons, we don’t get to see the screen full of dragons in manic violent action. The film instead decides that to rid the world of dragons, the original dragon must be killed because he is, apparently, the only male. This makes one wonder how he was able to produce more dragons, what with having no reproductive organs of his own, and why there were never any more males as a result of his miraculous births, but logic is not a strong point of the film. Anyway, even though the world has nearly been destroyed by the dragons, killing one really, really big dragon who is extremely powerful will save us all. Apparently. Still, some fun is had, seeing a dragon being hunted by the small army, using flying human bait, and McConaughey is all crazy-eyed, cigar chomping, tattooed, shaved-head, muscles-with-an-attitude wild man. Bale seems slightly out of place in an action film, but gives it his best, with few others in the cast really standing out or having much of a reason for being in the film at all. So, if you like dragons and don’t mind such things as plot or interesting characters, Reign of Fire is just fine. And dragons are still cool.
Rating: VID
