How To Train Your Dragon 2
2.5 Waffles!

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.