Dragonheart Review by Beth Ann Griese

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Starring	Dennis Quaid, Sean Connery (voice)
Director	Rob Cohen
Year	1996
What it's worth		Matinee (Good way to spend a couple of hours.)

That said, Dragonheart is no great mastery of cinematic accomplishment. If you don't care for fantasy movies, or if you wonder how such tiny wings could keep a huge dragon aloft or why he doesn't burn himself when he breathes fire, then it's best for you to skip this one. This is standard fantasy fare, right down to its socks, and proud of it. It's sincere until it hurts.

Quaid plays Bowen, a knight who has lost his faith in the worthiness of anything to raise his sword for. He is hiring himself out as a dragon hunter, because he believes a dragon to be responsible for corrupting the young king he used to serve faithfully, and now spends his vengeance for all his woes on every dragon he can find.

The dragon who started it all, by Murphy's Law, is the last one he finds, the final dragon left on earth. But when that dragon, instead of conveniently dying for him, challenges him to follow his Arthurian code and help the peasants under the king's bootheels, he finds finishing his quest a bit harder than he had anticipated.

It's a perfectly respectable story for a fantasy movie, which was my first surprise. From the snippets in the previews, I had expected something much more simplistic and chiched than this. Instead, we get characters with some conflicting emotions, decisions to make, consequences to live with. There are one or two pivotal scenes that are slightly muddled, and you have to pay close attention (or be very familiar with the genre) to know exactly what's going on. But for the most part, the plot stays coherent, and compelling.

Dennis Quaid doesn't generally get his due as an actor. He has remarkable talent and range. This is the guy who spent an entire movie in a metal bubble and convinced you he was travelling through a man's bloodstream. Now, he's a knight, and a darned good one, idealistic and disillusioned at the same time. Like Innerspace, it'll never be pointed to as a model for acting brilliance, but Quaid takes the pivotal role of the knight and treats it with the lightness it needs to not be taken too seriously, but also the earnestness required to pull viewers in.

The dragon is done through the latest marvels of computer animation, and it is quite an amazing feat. I was worried about using the voice of such a well-known actor, Sean Connery, to be the dragon's voice. But the second pleasant surprise of the movie was that the dragon really does work. When he's first introduced, his voice booms through cavern halls like you'd expect a dragon's to, fearsome and awe-inspiring. So when he faces Bowen outside his cave, no longer the terrifying enigma, the familiar voice of Connery is a perfect mouthpiece for him. My only complaint for the dragon is that sometimes he seemed almost too anthropomorphic; some of the things he was able to do during the movie was incredible, and the computer programmers who worked on him deserve a long, relaxing vacation after so much hard work.

So, if you're a fantasy fan, grab your ticket money and rejoice for having the first decent fantasy film in years on the big screen. If you're not, there's still plenty to enjoy in this movie, and not a bad choice to take kids too, either. (Depending on the sensitivity of the kids; there is some death and violence in it.) My biggest complaint in the whole film was its over-cheesy ending; they could have cut it by two minutes and vastly improved it. But the fact that this was my biggest complaint was my third and final pleasant surprise about the film.

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