Directed by: Hyung-rae Shim
Premise: A 500 year old prophecy comes to fruition
when the newest incarnation of a pair of Korean warriors combat a magical army
of darkness that is populated by dragons and reptilian creatures.
What Works: The special effects of Dragon Wars are mostly well done. The renderings of the creatures are impressive and the
sequences of dragon warriors engaging human military forces in a metropolitan
center is on par (and in some places even a little superior) to a similar
sequence in this year’s Transformers.
What Doesn’t: As good as the special effects are
in most scenes, that is all Dragon War has going for it and even in the
effects are subpar in places, most notably the corpse of an elephant that is
obviously an inflatable (While fleeing a dragon, one of the characters comes
into contact with it and elephant’s dead “body” moves.). Although the
dragon scenes are well done, other action sequences are staged and edited with
utter incompetence. The acting of the film is embarrassing to watch, although no
actor could do much with the material given to him or her in this film. The story
is incredibly stupid, even for the kind of light fantasy adventure that this
aims to be, and the myth is so convoluted that even ambitious viewers will find
themselves giving up halfway through. The film opens with a voice over
explaining the legend (echoing last year’s disastrous dragon picture Eragon)
and then tells the back-story of our protagonist in a flashback within a
flashback. As the story goes on, the characters learn about some sort of
prophecy to be fulfilled, although the details are never made clear to the
audience, and they fill their time together with nebulous dialogue about fate
and destiny. The mentor figure (Robert Forster) of the film keeps telling our
heroes that they must get to some special location to do something that will
stop the forces of darkness (although where or what is never clear either) but
they never get there. Yet, in the end our heroes are able to conquer the evil
forces without following the old man’s advice and instead, the screenwriter
invokes a Wizard
of Oz cheat. Rather than magical slippers, the amulet the hero wears
around his neck for the entire picture solves all of his problems for no
apparent reason.
Bottom Line: D-Wars is complete waste of
time and money. It looks as though some effort went into producing all of these
special effects, but the effort would have been better spent making a video
game, where this might have been more enjoyable. This film can’t even reach
the guilty pleasure qualities of Plan
9 from Outer Space or Jaws
3.