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Effects are only hot thing about 'Reign of Fire'
The heroes come upon a dragon head in 'Reign of Fire'
Jonathan Hession, Touchstone Pictures
Michael Machosky can be reached via e-mail or at 412-320-7901.
But for Hollywood's end of the world, it almost always boils down to the same thing: the sheer visceral thrill of watching stuff explode.
"Reign of Fire" doesn't add too much to the end-of-the-world genre. It does, however, make a significant contribution to the summer-movie, stuff-blowing-up genre. It's got $33 million worth of computer-animated dragons swarming over the earth, burning vast swaths of the planet to ash and cinders.
This particular apocalypse was accidentally instigated by Quinn, a young lad in present-day London, who accidentally wakes up an ancient dragon while playing around at an excavation site.
Let that be a lesson to you! Stay above ground so you don't wake the dragons.
Jump to 2020, and Quinn (Christian Bale) is the leader of a small band of starving humans holed up in the bowels of a Northumberland castle. Desperation takes hold. Then, a formation of tanks appears on the horizon.
"What's the one thing worse than dragons?" asks Quinn, hypothetically. "Americans."
Led by a bald, tattooed, cigar-chomping soldier named Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey), the ragtag American battalion demonstrates a way to kill dragons. McConaughey is the most startling special effect in the movie. The blond, corn-fed All-American star of "The Newton Boys," has been transformed into perhaps the world's ugliest professional wrestler.
Leave it to the swaggering American cowboys to get under the Englishmen's skin, and challenge their stoic acceptance of fate. Just like George W., Van Zan's going to go get those evil-doer dragons, whether the vacillating Europeans want to or not. A power struggle between Quinn and Van Zan is inevitable, but clearly, both have a score to settle with the dragons.
In a rare nod toward believability, the dragons don't really breathe fire, they spit chemicals out that combine into napalm several feet away — sort of a cross between a spitting cobra and a flamethrower. The dragons look great, of course, although you don't get a very good look at them. They're always shown from the humans' perspective, who usually are running and/or hiding from them.
As it is, "Reign of Fire" doesn't really strive to reach the post-apocalyptic zenith of "On the Beach," "A Boy and His Dog" and "Terminator." It instead settles somewhere in Kevin Costner territory, between "The Postman" and "Waterworld." As such, it endeavors to stay interesting not through plot and character, but through elaborately rendered sets — such as its ghostly, burnt-down London — and combat.
"Reign of Fire" also is virtually sexless — unless you count dragons as a Freudian construct — and has little in the way of graphic human-on-human violence, so it slips by with a PG-13 rating. Which is good — that's the age that awkward boys the world over discover Dungeons and Dragons, thus becoming the only ones who can really empathize with the ludicrous characters in "Reign of Fire."
| 'Reign of Fire' |
Director: Rob Bowman
Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Christian Bale, Izabella Scorupco
MPAA Rating: PG-13, for intense action
