How to train your dragon? As we learned back in 2010, it takes patience and fish.
Why train your dragon again? That’s harder for filmmaker Dean DeBlois to answer. His original animated “How to Train Your Dragon,” made in collaboration with Chris Sanders, is a 21st-century kiddie classic, a spry and delightful adventure about interspecies empathy. In the 15 years since, DeBlois has helmed its sequel, its three-quel and now this live-action version, which goes back to the beginning and repeats the same plot essentially word for word. Can you even call DeBlois’ latest one a reboot when he hasn’t stopped making them?
At least it’s a good yarn. Once more, we are regaled by the high-flying friendship between a Viking outcast named Hiccup and a so-called ferocious Night Fury named Toothless, who turns out to have the playfulness of a Bengal kitten and the loyalty of the Black Stallion. Both come from societies that see tiny acts of mercy as a terrifying risk. For decades, Hiccup’s village of Berk has been looted by sheep-stealing dragons — and the dragons in turn have been captured and used as training dummies for future dragon-killers. Together, the young pariah-turned-lizard-rider and his spunky pet prove there’s strength in pacifism.
I’ll never understand why Hollywood remakes good movies. At least the bad ones have things worth fixing. But having stuck the landing once (and a few more times), DeBlois doesn’t leave himself much runway to do something new and improved. This “How to Train Your Dragon” is merely longer.
That said, its message is still necessary: A boy grows up thinking that murdering stuff is awesome and then starts to question his town’s assumption that every outsider is a threat. Hiccup, played this time with game and gawky charm by Mason Thames, has been raised to think the only solution to violence is more violence. Turns out only some dragons are bad. It’s #NotAllDragons.
“Give me something to shoot at,” Hiccup whines, scanning the sky for a target. He wants to fit in with Berk’s other barbarian berserkers, all under the command of his father, Stoic the Vast (Gerard Butler, who also voiced the original character). Despite his son’s aggressive posturing, Stoic fears he’s spawned a waste of DNA.
One small modern-era update DeBlois has made to his script is that this Nordic hamlet has cut back on the number of blondes. It’s now an international coalition of fighters. Hiccup’s crush Astrid (Nico Parker) hails from somewhere else — she’s battled just to immigrate to Berk — causing her to cast an even deadlier side eye at this scrawny scion of privilege. She’s more aligned with the movie’s mild antagonist, a bully named Snotlout Jorgenson (Gabriel Howell), who gets to recycle one of the first film’s great zingers: “Why would I read words when I could just kill the stuff the words tell me about?”
Honing the ranks hasn’t helped Berk defeat the dragons. When DeBlois pans around Berk’s gathering hall, each citizen seems more busted up and exhausted than the last. He’s nudged the franchise a tiny half-step toward turning it into Oliver Stone for grade-schoolers — “Bjorn on the Fjords of July.” Stoic evens kicks off one of his pro-war pep talks with “So what if you’ve lost a leg?”
Hiccup’s dragon-fighting coach, Gobber the Belch (Nick Frost), has lost an arm and a leg. A blacksmith, Gobber forged himself a nifty set of swappable appendages: a sledgehammer, a hook, even a thumbs up and thumbs down for the scene when he has to gauge which of his pupils is the best new fighter. Frost and Butler are formidable screen presences when they’re simply wearing sneakers. Here, rampaging around in heavy pelts that double their girth, they’re clearly having a blast. Their beards alone are masterworks of virility.
Butler makes the only genuinely compelling case to let an actor do a cartoon’s job. In the second half of the film, he gives two searing looks — one to Hiccup, one to Toothless — that remind you of the power he can wield when inhabiting the right role. I also enjoyed Julian Dennison’s chipper and bookwormy Fishlegs Ingerman, a classmate of Hiccup’s who’s been padded to look as wide as he is tall. Still, little is gained by transforming actual cartoons into human cartoons. Seeing dirt under their fingernails is simply a lateral move.
This half-hearted interest in naturalism hurts more than helps. The nighttime and interior shots are so dark that you begin to pray, for Odin’s sake: Can someone please turn on the lights? Yes, the Vikings didn’t use electric bulbs. But they didn’t have dragons, either. So it would at least be nice to see them. Likewise, for every gorgeous shot of a tornado of dragons whirling though a crack in a cave, a dozen other potential stunners have been given a dull dusting of “authentic” dirt and fog. Hiccup and Toothless soar above a landscape so littered with distracting details — rocks and sun-dappled waves and scraps of mist — that we long for the simple beauty of a stark black dragon in the sky.
The flying shots feel oddly windless. Hiccup and Astrid look like kids with fake IDs at the Saddle Ranch waiting for someone to turn on the mechanical bull. Despite the technological advancement, Toothless’ velocity is less convincing than “The NeverEnding Story’s” Falkor the Luck Dragon over four decades ago. I thought Parker was decent in last year’s teen drama “Suncoast,” where she played a girl whose brother is dying of brain cancer. Here, her Astrid tough and pretty — and pretty flat. The character is somehow more lifeless in three dimensions than in 2D.
The irony is, animation is a medium of empathy. Our brains know a cartoon isn’t real — be it a rascally rabbit, a culinary rat or a dragon with the same sheen as salt licorice — and yet our hearts gift it with life. That’s why pretty much all of these live-action redos feel cold at their core. They’re not just inessential, they’re insulting. They don’t trust us barbarians to care about a world that doesn’t look like our own. They hold our hearts back.
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