Dragon Wars a Stupendously Idiotic Bomb
Television reporter Ethan Kendrick (Jason Behr, The Grudge) and beautiful young woman Sarah Daniels (Amanda Brooks, Flightplan) find themselves smack dab in the middle of a centuries-long fight against the forces of evil in the new fantasy adventure Dragon Wars: D-War. A giant snake, reappearing every 500 years and flanked by a massive lizard army, is after the girl because she is the reincarnated key to its evolution into a giant all-powerful dragon while Kendrick is the modern day vessel assigned with the task of protecting her. Lots and lots and lots and lots of chaos ripping apart Los Angeles ensues.
A giant snake attacks Los Angeles in Freestyle Releasing's Dragon Wars: D-War
Mixing Korean legends with Hollywood spectacle, writer and director Hyung-rae Shim has crafted a motion picture so mind-blowing in its idiocy I’m pretty sure even the Sci-Fi Channel would feel ashamed running the thing during one of is ubiquitous creature feature marathons. It’s no wonder it wasn’t screened for critics, the film one of the rare examples where it really was pointless to do so. But just because the studio knew the darn thing was awful doesn’t make it off limits to talk about. This picture makes recent big budget failures like The Invasion, Rush Hour 3 and The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer look like high art, and considering how inept all of those flicks were that’s really saying something.
In fairness, scenes of giant rocket-launching lizards laying city streets to ruin and fireball spitting flying serpents engaging in dogfights with Apache helicopters is kind of giddily engaging, while sequences showcasing the giant snake marauding through L.A. are admittedly impressive. But so what? This film is so dumb the most stereotypical vapid blonde bimbo has a higher I.Q. than anyone running around in this, the plot, people and actions so juvenile and imbecilic I’d almost believe Shim actually meant the whole thing as one gigantic over-produced joke.
In the end, we already had one fantasy adventure this year featuring monstrous figures trashing a major city with the American military virtually powerless to stop it, and while Transformers had more than its share of script problems even that Michael Bay juggernaut had more flair, style and – yes – intelligence than this. More, at least during the action scenes it was able to generate a palpable sense of wonder, awe and fun, things Shin and company couldn’t produce even if their lives depended upon it. Dragon Wars isn’t just bad, it’s an outright bomb, and the best thing that could happen is for the whole film to just slither back underneath the rock from which it nauseatingly came out from.
Film Rating: ê (out of 4)
