"Dragon Wars" Review - Written by TonyD

“Dragon Wars”
2007
*** out of ****
Director: Hyung-rae Shim
Cast: Jason Behr, Amanda Brooks, Robert Forster


There are two kinds of films that I just have to like – the first are true-life crime stories like “Zodiac.” The second kind are films where there are people/things destroying other people/things/places. I discovered this after watching that Roland Emmerich film “Godzilla.” Oh yeah, did it suck, but back then when you are nine years old, you’re just LOOKING for some big gigantic lizard knocking down buildings in New York. Since then, I have enjoyed countless monster movies, including “The Host,” the remake of “King Kong,” and of course, “Dragon Wars.”

But I will be the first to admit that “Dragon Wars” is terrible, so terrible that I haven’t seen a movie so unintentionally funny since “Eastern Promises”… wow that was like two weeks ago… Anyways, it’s bad, but the flick knows it’s a bad movie. In “Dragon Wars,” most people can go into this film saying: “So… there is a war… of dragons…” You would receive an A+ in the how-to-be-a-douchebag class. That gives you the opportunity to sleep with the super-hot teacher and get her arrested.

And though that “Dragon Wars” is totally bad, I never seen it before. So I had a choice between watching two films today – waste money again to go see “Alvin and the Delayed Puberty Chipmunks” with the family, or stay home and watch “Dragon Wars” and “Death Sentence.” Umm… yeah. You know that the advantage of being a film critic is that if you step in shit once, you don’t have to step in shit again to realize that it still stinks. So yeah, I’ll stay home and watch “Death Sentence” again just because Kevin Bacon rules, and I’ll watch “Dragon Wars” just because it’s better than “Alvin and the Hormonal Chipmunks.”

According to Korean legend–

Wait. What in the tits on Jesus am I telling you something like this? Why am I going to go on with the “plot”? It’s like Larry David going on about his day – it has no meaning to it. These guys who created this film really think that you are coming here to see dragons fight each other in Los Angeles, with their distraction being the United States military. If it wasn’t they were aiming for, I think that the audience and I totally missed the point of the film. What would give me THAT idea?

Like I said above, “Dragon Wars” SUCKS. But that doesn’t mean one can’t enjoy it. The film serves as a passageway to the Complete Bullshit trail, which means that the film, fictional or not, is still complete bullshit. There are holes that are bigger than Jennifer Schwalbach Smith’s va-jay-jay in “Clerks II” that are not filled, and there are characters in “Dragon Wars” that have very little development… very little development. And while I don’t have a problem with that, I’m sure that the usual movie-goer/critic would. Monster movies aren’t meant to be perfect, unless if you are Peter Jackson and you just have to have a two-hundred million dollar budget. You can have goofs and little character depth, just because that everyone likes to see monsters kill someone.

But while we’re on the subject of talking about monsters kill each other, let me bring up the fact that the special effects… look… awesome… No really. This seventy-five million dollar budget film was really spent well. It doesn’t look corny, and of course, it looks fake, but so did the dragon in “Shrek,” and you bastards said how pretty it looked. At least the dragons here looked decent and vicious.

It blows, because “Dragon Wars,” if released during the summertime when it SHOULD have been released, would have made more money. See, this movie made a SHITLOAD of money in South Korea, but here, it was only here for two weeks and dumped on the side of the road like a hooker with STDs. And that one movie that you all paid into was complete bullshit (you know, the one with the fighting robots). The director of that film had fucking wet dreams when he slept; when he slept at night, he dreamt a nightmare as a peaceful dream. And for Hyung-rae Shim, the director of “Dragon Wars”:

He creates a fucking nightmare, and these dragons are a fucking nightmare.

And like I said, the film isn’t perfect. The acting sucks and so does Keeley Hazell. But the special effects are fantastic looking and so is Keeley Hazell. You can decide between this or Keeley Hazell… or maybe I can make it easier on you… this or “Alvin and the Lisped Chipmunks”? The choice is yours.