There are some actors who don't have to go after movie roles anymore, because they are always in demand--Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Charlize Theron, Halle Berry, to name a few. Then there are some who are solid and dependable, who still have to do auditions or have their managers snag them parts: Terence Howard, Michael Rapaport, Ray Liotta, Naomi Watts, among others. Then there are the types of actors who are of marginal ability, but run amazing lucky streaks in the choices of roles on which they manage to glom. Actors who need that next paycheck, and will happily take whatever bones are thrown their way when the opportunity arises. One such actor is Jason Behr. Surprisingly, he may very well be the best thing in the new movie Dragon Wars.
And that says a whole lot about just how bad a movie this is.
Dragon Wars(which also goes by the title D-War, which is not as cool as the film's producers would like to think) wants to be an action packed thrill ride, when what it really turns out to be is an incoherent, chaotic mess. While it may actually not be the worst movie I've ever seen, it did its level best to work its way up my Most Hated list while I watched it. While viewing it, I came to understand almost immediately why there were no advance press screenings, no production photos on virtually any website except for its own, and why even Rottentomatoes.com currently has less than ten reviews--the majority of them negative--up for it. Well, my friends and I joke that my motto is "I watch bad movies so you don't have to!" With that said, if I can spare just one person's sanity by saving them from this current nightmare, then let's get started...
Dragon Wars makes the unconscionable, insipid mistake of having a tale with origins in the distant past, yet begins in the present, then begins to tell its tale in flashback...and then has a flashback-within-a-flashback! It's like something out of The Naked Gun, only director Hyung-rae Shim(director of about a dozen Korean films you and I have never heard of) wants the audience to take the material seriously!
The premise of the film(based on Korean legend) is that every 500 years, a great serpent called an Imoogi is born; part of an order of such serpents, chosen by heaven(like many such films with some aspect of the plot based loosely in spirituality, God Himself is strangely absent or never named) to protect mankind. There are other serpents of similar size and power called Buraki, and they are evil. If the Imoogi does its job, it's rewarded with a prize of power called the Yuh yi joo, which allows it to transform into its ultimate form--the dragon. In its new and invincible form, the former Imoogi is then allowed to ascend to heaven as a celestial being. Yuh yi joos are human females however...women born with a birthmark in the shape of a dragon, and their lives must be sacrificed in order to give the Imoogi its power. The last time an Imoogi was born was 500 years ago, but the celestial plan was fouled up when the young woman and her assigned guardian fell in love. They defied the will of heaven and jumped to their deaths, rather than have her sacrificed or have the Buraki devour her and claim the prize for itself.
Cut to the present, and we are introduced to reporter Ethan (Jason Behr), who visits a site of some unspecified disaster and witnesses a partial skeletal remain of a dragon spine being found. This causes him to remember a story told to him as a child; when he and his father visited an antique shop, young Ethan was bathed in a heavenly light when he found a strange chest in the back of the store. Feigning a heart attack, the shop owner, Jack(Robert Forster) conned Ethan's dad into running for help so he could have some alone time with Ethan. Because you should always leave your eight year-old kid alone with a com-plete stranger; that's a smart thing. Parents who don't like their kids, take note. Jack told Ethan the whole Imoogi story, and now in the present, Ethan is realizing that the prophecy is coming true. Utilizing his friend Bruce(The Office's Craig Robinson), who does some vague job with computers--the backgrounds on virtu-ally every single character in this film are only vaguely sketched out--Ethan begins a search for nineteen year-old women in the area who are about to turn twenty. Because Google is a magical tool by which human beings can type in the most vague outlines imaginable in order to find out who a person is and where they live...it's magic, just like this movie! And by "magic", I mean bulls**t.
Meanwhile, Sarah(Amanda Brooks from the Jodie Foster flop Flightplan) is a young woman who has no job that we're ever told about, and a couple of friends who hang out with her at the gym. Sarah has begun having bad nightmares and for some reason keeps a book full of Korean writing. She rips the pages out and pastes them on her wall, telling her friend Brandy(Aimee Garcia from the George Lopez show, yet somehow looking vaguely Middle Eastern here) she feels they are the only things keeping her safe. However, we're never told what the book is, why it might hold some power, or even who Brandy is. Is she just a friend? Is she Sarah's roommate? For some reason she has keys to Sarah's place, but yet again director Shim(who also wrote the script) never gives us all the details. In the meantime, there is also an Evil General(so named in the credits, but his identity is never revealed) played by Michael Shamus Wiles(Transformers, Monk), who seeks the Yuh yi joo so that he can bestow its power upon the Buraki. However, there are some plot holes which need filling...
First of all, we're never brought into director Shim's confi-dence enough to be told whether Evil General is the servant of the Buraki, if it's the other way around, or whether they just have some mutual partnership for whatever reason. That would help with character motivation and the audience's emotional invest-ment, since it's not clear just how intelligent the Buraki is. For most of the picture, it seems the Buraki is just an engine of des-truction, following nothing more than its senses in its attempts to find Sarah. Also, is the Buraki immortal? It's never explained whether dragons, Imoogi and Buraki are just long lived, if they are immortal, or what. It appears this is the same Buraki from the flashback-within-a-flashback, but we can't be sure, since the Evil General's face is covered in said FWAF, and it's assumed he's Korean like everyone else. Like the original souls of Ethan and Sarah, similarly reincarnated into the bodies of Caucasians(I guess Chow Yun-Fat, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh or any other Asian actor of repute must have read the script and either flat-out declined or probably lost their lunch after reading it), he must likewise be reborn, but Shim never sees fit to tell us.
To be honest, there really isn't much point to going on about the plot(such as it is) of Dragon Wars. The movie is like a love sonnet to shlock director Uwe Boll and Worst Director Ever Ed Wood--the latter finding his title challenged more and more these days. The CGI for the invading animals has all the realism of a test reel for the latest Xbox game, the performances of nearly every single actor in the film are laughable--with the surprise of Geoffrey Pierson(Unhappily Ever After, President Keeler on 24), who proves himself able to rise above the materi-al presented to him. There are scenes which feel incomplete, are badly edited, or just seem to have been neglected entirely by both Shim and the continuity director. For instance, Federal Agent Pinsky(Chris Mulkey) and his partner are on the first disaster scene where the dragon scale is found, and they are the ones who shoo Ethan away...yet in a later scene where they encounter Ethan again, Pinskey's partner asks him "Who are you?" The rules of the game change on a whim as well: it's established that Imoogi and Buraki alike must taste the power of the Yuh yi joo to become full-fledged dragons, yet there are smaller dragons seen constantly flying around both in the past and during the invasion of the present. It seems none of them had to taste anything to gain their abilities.
The character of Ethan is written as a pretty selfish jerk as well. There are a couple times where he abandons his friend Bruce during a crisis, and when someone happens to ask about him, Ethan simply states "I'm sure he's okay." There are several times when Ethan tries to get Sarah out of harm's way but makes no attempt whatsoever to find the Imoogi, knowing full well that without the power of the Yuh yi joo, the Imoogi can't attain full form and power, and the world will be doomed to the reign of evil. Now, there's a lot a guy will go through to prove himself worthy of bagging a babe, but I don't think having the world des-troyed and humanity brought to an end are high on anyone's list. Way to go, jackass. Also, the final encounter between good and evil takes place in an undisclosed location which seems like it's in another dimension or reality, but which is supposed to be Earth. There's no telling how far away from civilization Ethan and Sarah are, or where in the world Evil General and his forces found time to build both a castle and an altar in between fighting with the U.S. army and trying to take over the world. Meh. Maybe they outsourced. And without giving anything away, I can say there is only one good moment in the film, and that has to do with not copping out on a major plot point.
I'd tell you that you'll understand what I mean when you actu-ally see the movie, but I don't want you to see it. It is my most sincere hope that you'll stay away from it. Protect yourselves, protect your families, protect your friends and other loved ones. For those of you who carry tiny dogs around in purses, for God's sake, spare them as well by not taking them to see Dragon Wars. It's that rare film that makes you wonder how it got made, and why you spent good money on going to see it.
Official Archives of LanceReviews...
A celluloid abomination!
They've made our world their battleground...and our movie theaters, their personal toilets.
"What--? They've released the movie already? For the love of God, get the people out of the theaters! Now!!".
The special effects look better still than they do moving. Seriously.
Michael Shamus Wiles plays the most incompetent, least threatening, least prepared bad guy in the universe. It's no wonder two twentysomethings can outwit him.
Amanda Brooks plays savior-in-waiting Sarah. Too bad her manager didn't choose to save her from being in this film.
Behr and Brooks display the emotional range of a bag of marbles as they huddle in...something...as the dragon pre-pares to strike.
Would you hurry up and eat them already, so the rest of us can get back to our lives?!
