‘Dragon Wars’: A fire-breathing wreck

Thu, 09/20/2007 - 4:28pm
By: Michael Boylan

I wanted to call this review “Dragon Conned” but that would suggest that I thought this was going to be a good movie and was tricked. I knew it was going to be bad, I just didn’t know it was going to be this bad.

How bad was it?

It was so bad, two of the six people in the theater with me walked out.

It was so bad that I dozed. Twice.

It makes you wonder how movies like this get made in the first place.

“Dragon Wars,” at its heart, is about a girl who is born every 500 years with the power to turn a regular dragon into a celestial dragon. I just summed this movie up in about 20 words and yet the filmmakers took about 20 minutes and three flashbacks to tell this insipid tale. They also used words like imoogi, buraki and you yi joo every other minute. It is hard to sound serious when you keep talking about an imoogi and I wonder why the people in this movie even bothered. A little light-heartedness and a tongue firmly planted in cheek would have done this movie a world of good. But, alas, “Dragon Wars” took itself way too seriously and bored me to tears.

After we finally get to modern times and the current dragon threat over Los Angeles, we race around with cutie reporter Ethan looking for a 19-year-old girl named Sarah. It turns out that these two are the reincarnated former lovers who died the last time the good and bad dragons were trying to possess the imoogi (so close to oogie boogie). Ethan and Sarah are played by two fairly bland actors (Jason Behr and Amanda Brooks). I didn’t care what was going to happen to them, I just wanted them to hurry up and get there. Surprisingly, there are some familiar faces in the cast, including Craig Robinson from “The Office” (he’s the guy who heads up the warehouse and is hilarious), Robert Forster and Elizabeth Pena. It was really hard not to feel sad for them, but they got paid for this and I had to pay to see it.

Now, for anyone who saw the previews and kind of liked the idea of a mega dragon battle in L.A. during broad daylight, you should know that scene lasts six hours. Okay, actually it lasts closer to 20 minutes, but you get my point. This was one of the times I fell asleep. There were a handful of decent visuals in the sequence, but not nearly enough to make me forget that I wasn’t enjoying this movie.

Eventually, Ethan and Sarah get out of the city but it isn’t long before the foot soldiers and creatures serving the evil imoogi (it still sounds stupid) capture them and bring them somewhere that looks like a background on a Mortal Kombat game. This ticked me off because you really had no idea where they were - back in Korea? Hell? How did they get there? How long did it take? Who cares?

While in the evil setting, the good and bad imoogis battle for the you yi joo. Here’s an interesting fact, did you know that when imoogis fight they incessantly roar and scream a terribly high-pitched scream? Welcome to what woke me up from my second doze.

And then the movie just ends. I was grateful and yet one more minute of closure would have been nice.

So, if I knew this was going to be bad, why did I go? Well, because the other option was to see “Mr. Woodcock” and I refused to see the annual Billy Bob Thornton acting-like-a-jerk movie. I sat through “School for Scoundrels” last year and decided that if I had to see a bad movie, I wanted to see a really bad movie.

And I did.

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