Review: ‘Dragon Wars’

Dragon Wars is Korean director Hyung-rae Shim’s first attempt at an American blockbuster. ‘Attempt’ being the key word here. For some reason, this movie got an enormous amount of advertising and publicity when entering theatres. Furthermore, I found that the DVD release of Dragon Wars received no less attention as its theatrical release. Honestly, I cannot determine whether its a matter of blind optimism on the part of the distributors or a blatant attempt to muster up whatever additional revenue they can from unsuspecting movie-watchers.

I resisted seeing this movie for as long as I could, but there is a point where curiosity wins. As it turns out, curiosity does kill that cat… and the attention span of one viewer who normally can rough out even the worst schlock-ridden wastes of celluloid. First of all, I believe its important to understand one tiny bit of the director’s history; he’s spent virtually his entire career making Asian comedies. Now, suddenly, he’s metamorphosed into a director of a big-budget, American monster movie blockbuster. I don’t think so. Dragon Wars did garner a few laughs, but not intentionally. The laughter is merely the audience throwing their hands up in the air and giving up.

The script is full of plot holes and embarrassingly bad dialogue. The acting… well, let’s leave the actors alone. An actor can only work with what they have and this script doesn’t offer much. In an attempt to address the barrage of Internet hoopla surrounding Dragon Wars special effects, I give them some credit for not totally sucking. The effects are actually a par above the average Sci-Fi Channel original movie grade of CGI, but that’s all. While they do look good, they are often poorly rendered or poorly integrated into the scenes. Aside from this, and this is the only positive attribute of the film, Dragon Wars is mostly difficult to watch, unless you enjoy watching bad movies. If so, enjoy!

[rating:1/5]

DVD Details:

• Don’t buy it!!! (Unless, you are one of the above mentioned lovers of bad movies.)
• Don’t rent it!!! (Unless, you have a buy one get one free rental coupon, and you meet the above criteria.)
• Don’t expect any good extras: The DVD contains a mediocre making-of featurette, which mostly just praises how awesome the movie is; an animatics featurette which is eh, OK, I guess; and a photo gallery… woo-hoo! And, oh yeah… THAT’S IT!!!
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