Dennis Quaid cannot carry a movie. Nor can a gigantic computer animated dragon. Unfortunately, they are both asked to in “Dragonheart.” With an extremely mediocre script and a plot barely worthy of a CBS miniseries, “Dragonheart” ends up being some strange combination of a comic book and a soap opera.
Dennis Quaid stars as a knight of the “old code” of chivalry, who originally lives for the sole purpose of teaching this code to a young prince, heir to the throne of England. One day, Quaid and the prince travel to a battle site where the king is leading an army crushing another peasant revolt. The king is killed, and the prince takes over the throne.
But, he is injured beyond healing in the battle. So his mother takes him to a dragon who magically saves him by giving up half of his own heart. The dragon agrees to do this since the young king swears to abide by this code of chivalry for his entire life. Sound contrived? It gets worse.
Soon after, Quaid sees the king violating his oath, and for a reason that is never really explained, Quaid decides that the dragon bewitched him. Because of this, Quaid makes it his sole mission in life to rid the world of every living dragon.
That is just the first half hour. If that story hasn’t already bored you to tears, the rest of the plot will. Quaid ends up befriending the last living dragon, ironically the same one that saved the king in his youth, and they work together to save the kingdom from tyrannical rule.
With a plot like that, it takes fairly incredible acting to overcome it. Quaid was nowhere near up to the task. He seemed to work quite hard at perfecting an English accent - so hard that he uses at least a half dozen of them. The same goes for Sean Connery as the voice of the dragon. Connery has one of Hollywood’s best voices to begin with, but it seems that he tries to alter it unnecessarily for the role.
Some of the cinematography is okay, and keeps the movie temporarily interesting. Some shots of the dragon terrorizing peasant villages are entertaining, at least from a thrill perspective. They don’t add to the flow of the film a whole lot, but are fun to watch.
I can’t think of any comparable alternatives to “Dragonheart” coming out this summer, but I also can’t think of any films in theaters now that are any worse. Action films like “Twister” and “Mission: Impossible” and dramas like “Jane Eyre” and “The Truth About Cats and Dogs” all make “Dragonheart” look like a Saturday morning cartoon, and make spending even three bucks on “Dragonheart” look really dumb.
Grade: D