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
- Review: Daybreakers
For evidence of the breakdown of the capitalist system, look no farther than the proliferation of vampire and zombie movies.
- Review: The Spy Next Door
Let’s hope Chan’s fans back East never get a whiff of this one.
- Review: A Town Called Panic
This stop-motion comedy from Belgian filmmakers Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar is the anti– Fantastic Mr. Fox — its lack of visual and psychological nuance is, merci, quite deliberate.
- Review: Mystery Team
Indie comedy has it tough in the marketplace, so though it's no fun to pan the first feature by the Derrick Comedy troupe, neither was it fun to watch Mystery Team .
- Review: Legion
What are angel wings made of? Why, bulletproof titanium with razor-sharp tips to slice open the entrails of sinners.
- Review: Extraordinary Measures
Most parents would go to great lengths to save a child in peril, but would they find a cure for a terminal disease?
- Review: Dear John
"We're sitting here . . . and we're talking, but nobody's actually saying anything."
- Review: Shutter Island
I read Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island , a 336-page throat-grabbing mystery thriller, in two nearly sleepless nights.
- Camera obscura
An acquired taste in French cinema, Philippe Grandrieux is an abstractionist who does narrative features, a post-punk artiste as comfortable making Marilyn Manson music videos as he is war-zone documentaries. But his three major features — which the Harvard Film Archive is screening this weekend and next — revel in a dangerous minimalism.
- Review: Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief
That must've been one rockin' party the gods of Ancient Greece had with the hotties of America back in the early '90s, since they left a string of demigods with absentee-daddy issues behind.
- Review: Ajami
Set in the Arab neighborhood of the title, this Israeli nominee for the Best Foreign Language Oscar starts out like a Middle Eastern Boyz N the Hood .
- Less
Topics:
Reviews
, Entertainment, Movies, Gerard Butler, More
, Entertainment, Movies, Gerard Butler, Gerard Butler, Arts, Animation, James Cameron, James Cameron, Jay Baruchel, Jay Baruchel, Less