How To
Train Your Dragon 2
Jay Baruchel is back as the voice of Hiccup – the
unfortunately named Viking who learned how to train and love dragons in
the first movie. He should be celebrating life with the most beautiful
lady in all of the land, Astrid (American Ferrera), ready to become his
wife, and his Dad, Stoic (Gerard Butler), ready to step down and make
Hiccup the new chief of the Viking tribe, but our young dragon rider
would rather be out exploring the world with his dragon buddy,
Toothless.
Of course, when you explore the world, you might not like what you
find, and Hiccup has some major problems when he comes across a gang of
dangerous dragon trappers who work for an evil warlord known as Drago
(Djimon Hounsou). This bad guy is trying to control every dragon on the
planet to form his own dragon army, and the only people who stand in
his way are Hiccup, Astrid, Stoic and the rest of the good Vikings of
Burke.
Writer/director Dean DeBlois wants to fill How
To Train Your Dragon 2 with some
sort of lesson about love versus war or nurture versus nature or
something like that, but the message is muddled beyond recognition
because the audience wants to see dragons flying around and cartoon
characters acting silly. Those are the best parts of the movie, and
DeBlois doesn’t give himself enough material to make the
point he wants to make.
DeBlois and the animation team do a wonderful job showing us the
dragons majestically soaring through the air, engaging in death defying
battles and creating all sorts of havoc, but don’t look too
closely for much else.
How To Train
Your Dragon 2 is a good enough
movie with plenty of laughs, but it is quite dark. Little kids might
not understand some of the immense peril our characters face, or the
power evil exerts over the characters the wee ones cherish as cute
stuffed animals sleeping with them in their bed every night.
Let’s just say one of our heroes does something quite
heinous, which will scare the daylights out of a 4-year old, and will
be very difficult to explain to others. Who thought How
To Train Your Dragon 2 should be
the modern day equivalent of The
Empire Strikes Back? Can we give
it a rating of PG-10 or PG-11?
How To Train
Your Dragon 2 also drags. This
is a movie that could have used some trimming as the audience is taken
down many roads, but not all of them are very important, explain that
theme DeBlois seems to want us to understand or lead to memorable
scenes you will want to view over and over again.
In a way, How To Train Your
Dragon 2 is ambitious, but
doesn’t quite reach those lofty goals.
How
To Train Your Dragon 2 is rated PG for adventure action and some mild
rude humor.
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