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(Review originally written at 16 December 2006)

Unlike the title suggest, this movie hardly features any dragons and the movie should perhaps had been titled; "George and the Dragon Egg".

Still the movie further more features all of the adventures ingredients you would expect. Swordfights, princesses, traveling, villains. The movie is a fairly good adventure family for the entire family. The movie features some violence but the fun musical score by Gast Waltzing makes sure that the movie remains always light and fun to watch, no matter how serious or scary the movie ever gets.

The story is rather weak and simple and the way it is told makes things even worse. Everything is told so formulaic and predictable that nothing ever comes as a surprise- or across as well written. It makes everything that happens in the movie feel disjointed and also quite messy. The character treatment is poor and at least halve of the characters that are introduced seems to be redundant for the movie. Tom Reeve obviously is not a very experienced director yet and I'm not too sure if the real talent for it is present. He often works as a producer or second unit director of B-action movies. The kind of stuff Dolph Lundgren, Rutger Hauer and Christopher Lambert star in. This production is definitely a step-up from those movies but Tom Reeve didn't handled this opportunity very well.

Appearantly the movie cost $32,000,000 to make but it doesn't really show in the movie. Sure, the sets and costumes all do look nice but what the movie lacks are some truly impressive and large scale sequences or even some spectacular action sequences. It makes the movie really low budget looking. Looks like they spend most of the budget on the cast.

The cast is surprisingly enough filled with some big names but yet the casting gets no thumbs up from me. James Purefoy is a good actor and he mostly showed that in the HBO mini-series "Rome" but he's not good and charismatic enough to play the main heroic character of this movie. The supporting cast is far more impressive with actors like Patrick Swayze, Piper Perabo, Michael Clarke Duncan and Val Kilmer in a small cameo. But unfortunately for most of them also goes that they're miscast in their roles. Piper Perabo plays her character with an overdone English accents that doesn't suit her. It makes you wonder why didn't cast a real English and good actress instead. Also Patrick Swayze feels really out of place in this movie but he at least seemed to be enjoying himself playing in this movie. The highlight of the movie is perhaps the Val Kilmer cameo.

Still the movie entertains enough to consider this a watchable enough, at least if your expectations for it aren't too high. The movie does have its good and adventurous moments but it all is not quite good and impressive enough to consider this a real truly great genre movie.

5/10

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About Frank Veenstra

Watches movies...writes about them...and that's it for now.
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