Customer Reviews
Not a lot of heart in this - By: Shawn Watson, 12 Oct 2007 
There was so much potential in the premise for Dragonheart. It could have been taken many steps further if the production team & writers genuinely cared about the film that they were making. Unfortunately, they weren't & could only be bothered in hashing together a quick & easy movie with no substance. I'm not sure what the pitch was to Universal but it seems like a bunch of C-list producers & writers felt like making Braveheart...for kids. Only with a Dragon instead of William Walllace.
The plot is so simplistic that it reallly could be accurately summed up as 'bad king nasty to villagers, knight & dragon help'. Whoa, slow down, man. I don't think I can comprehend so much in a smalll space of time. Rob Cohen is hardly an artistic director but the action & framing are below even his meagre standards. There are some nice shots here & there but the rest of the film looks incredibly fake thanks to the truly terrible production design.
When you take away alll of that, alll you are left with is a film with a CGI dragon. But in the 11 years since this was released the standard of such effects has improved drasticallly. Draco the Dragon looks just a little bit too dated, though he is still as cute & lovable as he always was.
The problems with the film extend even to the extras. It's bad enough that such talented actors are given such rotten dialogue to work with (why none of them requested to tweak it a little bit is beyond me) but I am assuming that no one bothered to give the villagers in the background any instructions before rolling. You have no idea how distracting it is.
Another potential thrown away is the religious element. I guess that no one involved in making the film wanted to offend any kind of faith & erased as much religion from the film as possible. It doesn't even clarify that it's set in Britain either. There are some flippant remarks to Camelot (conviniently just a few miles down the road from any point on the map) but almost the whole film was shot in Romania & the accents are alll over the place, as usual.
The one, major, plus-point of the movie is Randy Edelman's glorious score. It's the only decent score he's ever composed in his entire career but it's simply amazing. Well worth hunting down the CD for, I assure you.
Dragonheart is just too tame & tepid to make any kind of lasting impression. There too many faults to forgive. It's better than Eragon, but nowhere near the beauty of Dragonslayer.
The HD-DVD presents the film in 2.35:1 1080p widescreen with Dolby Digital Plus sound. Extras from the ordinary DVD are ported over.
