Fire-breathing dragons won't quite light up your summer

Fire-breathing dragons won't quite light up your summer

By DUANE DUDEK Journal Sentinel film critic

Friday, July 12, 2002

I hate hot. And don't get me started on the humidity.

Maybe this phobia can be traced to my getting the air conditioning knocked out of me as a kid by the 1961 Cold War British thriller "The Day the Earth Caught Fire," in which our planet is knocked off its axis by nuclear testing and sent hurtling toward the sun.

Hey, it could happen.

But the threat of global warming is the least of our worries in "Reign of Fire," set in a near future in which the planet has been turned into a cinder. By fire-breathing dragons.

OK, it can't happen.

And perhaps it represents a drop in the creative thermostat from socially topical to simply tropical. But the world of speculative fiction has always had room in its woodwork for a believe-it-or-not universe of eccentric visions and the eccentrics who envision them.

The latter, in this case, are Gregg Chabot and Kevin Peterka -- two Milwaukee-area men who initially sold the screenplay seven years ago and have lived long enough to see it get made, by director Rob Bowman, who also directed "The X-Files" movie in 1998.

There are several ways this story could be told, but the way it is told here leaves something to be desired. Since it is set in a cloistered, almost medieval society of survivors, it is absent a larger sense of the future and how it has evolved. It uses montage to imagine what happened to get to this point, and scenery-chewing Christian Bale, as a monkish if ineffective leader of a small group of British survivors, and particularly Matthew McConaughey, as a bald and buff lunatic American dragon hunter, as the last flickering flames of the human spirit.

Bale and his tribe have resigned themselves to their fate, but the tattooed, wild-eyed, stogie-chewing McConaughey and his small army -- including a helicopter and several tanks -- have committed themselves to defeating the dragons, who nest like birds.

The film establishes twilight as the "magic hour" when the dragons are vulnerable but never acts on it, instead setting up a monster- truck-rally-type finale with McConaughey as a harpoon-carrying Ahab.

The mythology of the dragons is unexplored. The film is not stingy with effects, and its hermetic atmosphere is effectively realized, but leaves the film so spare of air that combustion never leads to conflagration.

There is a terrific scene in which McConaughey and his army kill a dragon in midair, but for the most part, too much is explained and not enough is demonstrated. Its portrait of a burned-out world suggests a "Mad Max" sort of future that is missing that film's less- is-more sinew.

"Reign of Fire" had money to burn, and spent most of it using "Jurassic Park"-era technology to create Ray Harryhausen-caliber creatures.

Reign of Fire * *

Cast: Christian Bale, Matthew McConaughey, Izabella Scorupco, Gerald Butler Behind the scenes: Produced by Richard D. Zanuck, Lili Fini Zanuck, Roger Birnbaum and Gary Barber. Written by Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka and Matt Greenberg. Directed by Rob Bowman. Rated: PG- 13; intense action, violence

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