Director: Ivan Silvestrini
Distributor: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment
Duration: 97 minutes
Dragonheart Vengeance (Blu-ray) – Movie Review
Dragonheart was one of THE movies in the 90s and one of the last roles in which Sean Connery had such a big presence, even if it was only by lending his voice to the production. The movie became an icon in cinema, but for some reason, even with the story finished, sequels were made. The second movie arrived within four years, while for the rest we had to wait for over 15 years. Now we are already at the fifth movie of the series, called Vengeance. As the title indicates, this will be a story about revenge.
The movie starts by showing us Lukas (Jack Kane) and his family. They live a happy, but simple life tending to their land. Sadly, Lukas’ life gets shaken up when his family is brutally murdered by a band of four criminals and his family home is burned to the ground. With only a couple of cows left in his care, he heads to the city to find someone to help him on his quest for vengeance. He is lucky enough to see the king roaming the streets, but both the king and his guards care not for his hardships and tell him to hire a mercenary.
He then sells his cows in order to be able to pay a mercenary to exact his revenge. He is approached by Darius (Joseph Millson), who tells him he will take on his quest, as other mercenaries aren’t reliable. A scuffle happens in the bar as other sellswords cheat Lukas out of his money and they take on Darius in a fight. Lukas escapes amidst the chaos and tries his luck elsewhere. He breaks in at the local blacksmith and barters himself a sword to take on the criminals himself. The blacksmith advises him to visit the dragon, as it will certainly have the power to aid Lukas.
The flow of the movie is somewhat predictable, especially on who gets wounded and when. You’ll get a fairly basic revenge-driven plot, a dragon that has been shunned by humanity that joins the team, and a bounty hunter that clearly has a past with the dragon. These three will form the base of the movie, all while going after those who killed Lukas’ parents. The overall plot is decent, but it has been done before, and you know a lot of what is going to happen before it actually happens. Nonetheless, the spread of information is well handled, the action is present, even though not every effect in this movie has been handled as well as it could. You can see limbs being chopped off, only to clearly see that the victim’s arm is still as long as his other arm, even though his hand is supposed to be gone. Or at the end, when you see an actor clearly holding his hand behind his back, as he should be missing an arm, things snap you back to reality quite quickly.
As far as acting performances go, Vengeance has B-team written all over it. You will probably notice that the cast members are all unfamiliar faces and, while some may look slightly familiar, you will realize you don’t know them at all when looking up their previous work. Surprisingly Helen Bonham Carter is part of the cast, namely the voice of Siveth. We noticed that the voice acting was fairly decent, even with the somewhat shoddy animated dragon in the movie. All sentiments aside, for a movie that clearly had a low production budget, the acting performances were still decently handled. The cast can only do as good as the script and the resources, and in this scenario, both were somewhat simplistic and cheap.
The Blu-ray version of Dragonheart Vengeance comes with only two extras that span a total of five minutes. You’ll see a short snippet about the movie itself, and another short feature that revolves around Siveth, or at least the voice actress Helen Bonham Carter. It would have been nice to have a bit more information about the series as a whole, or extras about the other dragons.
Conclusion
Dragonheart Vengeance is an okayish fantasy flick with a rather low budget. It would have scored a bit better if it didn’t bear the Dragonheart name, as the current production value seems as if this movie also dates back from 1996. If you enjoyed the previous movies, you’ll probably like this one as well, but it’s not really a qualitative piece of cinema.
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