Researching a book on the canonization of Josemaria Escrivá, journalist Robert Torres (Dougray Scott) reaches out to his estranged father Manolo (Wes Bentley), who grew up with Escrivá (Charlie Cox) and witnessed the creation of Opus Dei, the Catholic organization founded by Escrivá. Manolo uses the opportunity to reveal his family’s history to his son, exorcising personal demons he’s kept hidden for decades.

CRITIQUE

Roland Joffé’s career has fallen so far he’s now directing vanity projects for the Catholic Church. Although it’s being sold as a historical drama, in reality There Be Dragons (the title is a corruption of the warning found on maps centuries ago) is nothing more than a fawning, one-sided love letter to Josemaria Escrivá. There’s no real story here, no real characters. The movie exists for the sole purpose of painting Escrivá in as favorable a light as possible. Not that anyone should have expected anything else from a movie initiated and funded by Opus Dei.

I haven’t seen every movie Joffé has directed since he made his feature debut with The Killing Fields, but the ones I have seen haven’t been good. (And that includes The Mission, which is an unbelievably beautiful movie but can’t decide if it wants to be the sort of movie David Lean made in the ‘60s or the sort he made in the ‘70s.) His take on The Scarlet Letter is one of the worst pieces of junk made in my lifetime (although it is mesmerizing in its awfulness), and Captivity is beyond sad. You’d think casting Patrick Swayze in an earnest drama set in India would be the creative nadir for any filmmaker, but Joffé continues to find new ways to impress with his ability to make incredibly poor decisions.

His poor decisions continue here, most notably in the areas of scripting and casting. Joffé penned the script himself, which means he has no one to blame but himself for the staggeringly dull plotting, tin-eared dialogue, and poorly drawn characters. Much of the movie alternates between scenes in which the characters sit around and spout dialogue that sounds as if someone pulled it from Catechism for Dummies and scenes in which Manolo runs with a band communist rebels he’s infiltrated for Franco (who’s still dead, by the way).

It’s a tossup as to which is more boring. You’d expect the former to be boring, but Joffé’s obvious lack of interest (his payday was big enough to land him but not big enough to make him care) in the material means the latter is equally lifeless. When it comes to this movie, if you’ve seen one scene of people discussing Catholic doctrine you’ve seen them all, and if you’ve seen one scene of communist rebels fighting the Spanish army (staged with all the excitement and energy you expect to find in a television commercial for reverse mortgages) you’ve seen them all.

In addition to being boring, the stuff with the rebels is also stupidly, illogically cliché. Joffé even goes so far as to give Manolo a woman to pine for. Played by Olga Kurylenko, this woman is as tough as any of her male compatriots, charging into the thick of battle and dispatching her enemies with ruthless precision. She also never so much as gets a smudge on her face or a hair out of place. This storyline climaxes with what’s meant to be a moment of great shock and impact, but Joffé blows it by spoiling it early on and not establishing any logical or emotional reason for it to occur. It comes across as nothing more than a lame twist, an act of desperation.

Turning the story into a cinematic puff piece renders it worthless as a story. Joffé paints everyone and everything is such broad strokes that there’s no real drama or heat. Escrivá is, no pun intended, portrayed as an unwavering saint, selfless beyond belief, the only thing on his mind the wellbeing of others. Anyone with an opposing viewpoint is portrayed as an obdurate fool. You won’t learn a bloody thing about Escrivá (and not just because he inexplicably disappears from his own story for much of the second hour).

The Spanish Civil War is reduced to a clash between those guys and those other guys. Aside from the way they dress, there’s no difference between the two sides. It was a messy, bloody, complex conflict, wannabe dictators on both sides acting like junkyard dogs fighting over scraps, the people caught in the middle all but forgotten, but there’s no context to it here; it comes across as little more than a means of getting some action into the movie.

The acting ranges from atrocious to passable. Scott’s his usual terrible self, and Bentley is his usual wooden self. I don’t think a single one of the main actors speaks Spanish, so you get a bunch of inconsistent, obviously fake accents. Much (but not all, which makes it even weirder) of Bentley’s dialogue in the modern-day scenes is dubbed, an attempt at making him sound older. It’s distracting for a number of reasons, the primary one being that he sounds exactly like the voice on the tape Arnold uses in the hotel scene in True Lies; I kept waiting for him to tell Jamie Lee Curtis to dance for him. And the old-age make-up applied to Bentley for these scenes is hilariously awful; he looks like a discount Elvis impersonator.

So it’s another failure for Joffé, who with each subsequent effort looks less and less like the guy who made The Killing Fields and more and more like an imposter who killed the real Joffé and assumed his identity. After all, the real Joffé would never open a loving, reverent, impassioned religious biopic with a bullet-time shot, would he?

One last thing: A couple weeks after this Blu-ray and its DVD counterpart were announced, word came down that There Be Dragons was being re-released theatrically, this time by a different distributor and in Joffé’s preferred version. So while Joffé ultimately signed off on the version you’ll find here (and has been diplomatic about its existence), it’s not exactly the movie he wanted audiences to see. That being said, unless it features a completely different cast and was shot from a completely different script, I can’t imagine his preferred cut being much of an improvement.

THE VIDEO

The 2.35:1/1080p transfer--encoded with AVC onto a 50GB disc--is a very solid effort, marred only by some aliasing and moderate black crush (which is arguably a byproduct of the often dark cinematography but is nevertheless egregious enough to point matter). The image has a naturalistic look that is very pleasing and complements the story well (and would complement a good story even better); colors are rich and warm, rendered here almost without flaw. Depth and clarity are strong, and the image is sharp and detailed (which does the cheap CG in the battle sequences no favors) without looking processed.

THE AUDIO

The only audio option is an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track. Interiors can be light on atmosphere, but exteriors are generally immersive and spacious. And while the battle sequences may look clunky, they sound fantastic, with some very deep bass and surround action that is both precise and enveloping. Dialogue, relatively speaking, sounds good, but the mix can’t obscure the shoddy dubbing. English SDH and Spanish subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

Facing Your Dragons (4 minutes, HD) is a talking-head piece in which Bentley discuses his character.

The only other extra is a compilation of deleted scenes (31 minutes, HD). I don’t know if any of the material here is present in Joffe’s preferred version, but I do know it wouldn’t make much (if any) difference. (Although presented in high-def, the quality is a little rough, as these scenes were obviously sourced from a workprint videotape.)

FINAL THOUGHT

It’s unsatisfying in just about every way imaginable.