The Phoenix Network:
 
 
About  |  Advertise
 
Features  |  Reviews
unsexy2011_1000x50b

Review: How To Train Your Dragon

Also better than Avatar
By BRETT MICHEL  |  February 24, 2011

Animation directors Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders have fashioned a family entertainment that functions as a copy of James Cameron’s most successful film of all time. It’s got the young hero from a war-bred culture who joins sides with the “enemy;” it’s got romance (only here, he’s the chief’s offspring); it’s got an at-first-untrainable dragon that he bonds with, taming it as they take to the skies; it’s dazzlingly presented in 3-D.

It’s also better than Avatar. Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel), the hapless hero, is a scrawny Viking, a dragon hunter-in-training. And he’s terrible at it, an embarrassment to his warrior father, Stoick (Gerard Butler). Toothless, Hiccup’s cat-like dragon steed, shares DNA with the alien in the directors’ Lilo & Stitch, and their new film seems cloned from that movie, as well, as a youth secretly fosters a lethal beast.

But this one’s a real beauty.

Related: Review: Daybreakers, Review: The Spy Next Door, Review: A Town Called Panic, More more >
  Topics: Reviews , Entertainment, Movies, Gerard Butler,  More more >
| More

 Friends' Activity   Popular   Most Viewed 
ARTICLES BY BRETT MICHEL
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   REVIEW: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL  |  December 20, 2011
    Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) returns to the screen in dramatic fashion as new teammate Jane (Paula Patton) and the returning Benji (Simon Pegg) break him out of a Russian prison.
  •   REVIEW: WE BOUGHT A ZOO  |  December 20, 2011
    Matt Damon plays Mee, a journalist who decides that he and his daughter (a precocious Maggie Elizabeth Jones) and sullen teenage son (Colin Ford) need a new start after the death of his wife, so he spends his life savings on a house in the country.
  •   REVIEW: SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS  |  December 13, 2011
    A new game is afoot in director Guy Ritchie's return to the world of Sherlock Holmes, but Robert Downey Jr.'s first outing as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famed sleuth puts Shadows in the shade.
  •   REVIEW: THE SITTER  |  December 13, 2011
    David Gordon Green's latest finds him working in the scruffy comic realm that's shrouded his past couple of pictures in a pot-smoke haze.
  •   REVIEW: JACK AND JILL  |  November 15, 2011
    Director Dennis Dugan's second Adam Sandler vehicle of the year turns out to be even worse than Just Go with It.

 See all articles by: BRETT MICHEL

MOST POPULAR
RSS Feed of for the most popular articles
 Most Viewed   Most Emailed