REIGN OF FIRE (2002)  *1/2

Reviewed 7/12/02

Everyone finds dragons fascinating, right?  Giant winged reptilian beasts that breathe fire – what’s not to like?  Director Rob Bowman and writers Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka and Matt Greenberg remembered to serve up the dragons in this movie but forgot everything else like an interesting story and fleshed-out characters.

Actually even the dragons come in short supply.  The computer-generated monsters move with wondrous fluidity and are vividly imagined, but they don’t actually have that much screen time.  Where they do appear, the only interaction they have with the human characters is to spew fire on them, and that gets old pretty quickly.

The story starts off in present day London where a young boy, Quinn (Ben Thornton), meets up with miner mom (Alice Krige) in the middle of a dig.  The miners have disturbed a live dragon long buried beneath the earth and Quinn is the first to discover it.  Jump to the post-apocalyptic year 2020 where dragons now run rampant and rule the world.  Attempts to destroy the creatures with nuclear weapons and the dragons themselves have left civilization in ruins.  Only scattered pockets of humanity still survive, and the now grown Quinn (Christian Bale) leads one of them.  Holed up in an old English castle, Quinn and his best friend Creedy (Gerard Butler) watch over a couple dozen orphan children.

One day, an American military force arrives in the form of dilapidated armored vehicles, a tank and a helicopter.  The Americans are led by Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey), who stalks the earth like Colonel Kilgore from APOCALYPSE NOW.  He is accompanied by female helicopter pilot, Alex (Izabella Scorupco), who gains an immediate rapport with Quinn.  Van Zan tells Quinn all the dragons are female but one and destroying it will finish off the species (never mind the contrivance of what species could ever evolve this way).  This alpha male dragon resides in London, where Van Zan is heading, but he needs more men to kill it.  Quinn refuses to help believing that fighting with the dragons only results in more death.

Here is a movie with a premise that has tremendous possibilities but none of them are explored.  Quinn, who might irrationally blame himself for uncovering the dragons, could be an interesting character, but he’s just not.  He’s essentially Pappagallo, the decent if stubborn leader of survivors in THE ROAD WARRIOR, and it’s easy to see why Max is the central character in that movie and not the bland Pappagallo.  Van Zan is no solution either – a purely militaristic archetype.  As Van Zan, McConaughey at least looks like he’s having fun with the role.  Sculpted with muscles, he struts around like he’s ridden a horse for too long and hams it up on cue.

The middle of the film revolves around a major plot turning point – how to get Quinn to join Van Zan on his mission - that is extremely contrived.  The terribly unoriginal solution is to have the beloved sidekick buy the farm.  One action scene in which sky divers try to net a dragon gives the movie some momentum, but there’s just not enough stuff like that.  Everything else, especially the ending, is rote and predictable.   The dragons and Quinn’s castle bring to mind medieval themes, but nothing more is done with this idea.  One wonders how with three writers, so little of interest makes it up on screen.  All of it evaporates from the brain the instant the lights go up.