Reign of Fire Review
by Susan Granger (ssg722 AT aol DOT com)July 15th, 2002
Susan Granger's review of "Reign of Fire" (Touchstone Pictures)
Combine a pinch of "Highlander" with a generous dollop of videomania and you come up with this "Road Warrior"-type of apocalyptic adventure. The story begins in present-day London where, after school one day, a British schoolboy, 12 year-old Quinn, joins his project engineer-mother (Alice Krige) who is working in an underground subway construction site. Suddenly, the deep drilling disturbs a cave where a massive, fire-breathing dragon has been hibernating for centuries. While escaping to the surface, Quinn's mother is killed. Skip ahead several decades, and dragons have conquered the world, devouring everyone except militant groups of survivors who have barricaded themselves in fortresses. There's one in Northumberland that's led by the now-grown and muscular Quinn (Christian Bale). (In the evenings, he and a cohort amuse their orphan charges with a play based on George Lucas's "Star Wars" mythology.) Into their midst comes an American search-and-destroy dragon-hunting squad led by a bald, buff, tattooed brute (Matthew McConaughey) and his blond-babe helicopter pilot (Izabella Scorupco). They drop paratroopers, called archangels, from a helicopter to net flying dragons and slay them with crossbows. They've deduced that, while there are many females, only one male dragon exists - and killing him would mean the survival of the human species. While the giant, computer-generated, fire-breathing dragons are awesome and scary, the writing trio (Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka, Matt Greenberg) and director Rob Bowman rely too much on montages and shadowy insinuations. Plus, the supporting actors' thick Cockney accents are often indecipherable. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Reign of Fire" is a scorched 4, giving a new meaning to global warming.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
