DRAGONHEART (34)

Directed by: Rob Cohen

Starring: Dennis Quaid, David Thewlis, Julie Christie, the voice of Sean Connery

The Pitch: In medieval England, a dragon bands together with a noble knight to defeat an evil king.

Theo Sez: A sad botch that looks like it might develop in any number of interesting ways before plumping for the blandest and dullest - and most incoherent. The early scenes, with their echoes of Arthurian legend and their mystical, lordly dragon acting as a go-between from the realm of magic, seem to promise a kind of kiddie EXCALIBUR, but what follows is thin and fatally inconsistent, teetering between joky pastiche and muddy-peasants adventure story : all the resonance evaporates and even the dragon becomes cutesy and benign, an overgrown pet for our hero to bond with. All in all, a reminder of the splashy but inept movies Dino de Laurentiis (this producer's father) became notorious for - "producer's movies" like the 1976 KING KONG, all PR and no content : it's able to snare an excellent cast (most absurdly John Gielgud, voicing the "spirit of King Arthur" and lending his dulcet tones to approximately twenty seconds of high-flown gibberish) and to get an (undoubtedly) excellent deal on Slovak crew and locations - but, having presumably pre-sold the movie, doesn't bother with a script. Before long, as the goings-on get increasingly erratic and the film careens about all over the place, one's mind starts inexorably drifting away from the narrative and towards incidental questions : most crucially, whether director Cohen landed this gig because his previous film was full of well-managed action sequences, or just because it was called - misleadingly enough - DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY.