Dragon Wars: Big laughs, plus cool special effects.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

Would you imagine that the line "What are you talking about?" might provoke one of the bigger laughs of the movie year? And not once--but twice in the same film? Dragon Wars, the Korean all-time box-office blockbuster, is that movie. The line arrives first from the lips of a little boy to whom Robert Forster is reciting perhaps the biggest bundle of hodge-podge exposition to leave one mouth for another's ear in movie history. All of a sudden, in the midst of Forster’s babbling—Bam!—comes this funny, five-word deflator. Then the scene suddenly shifts from 21st-Century Los Angeles to 16th Century Korea, where a character who appears to be the Korean equivalent of the "Shogun" begins telling his underling more HPE (hodge-podge exposition: Dragon Wars may have coined a whole new descriptive phrase) until fellow number two also asks, in seeming desperation (and English subtitles), "What are you talking about?!" Really, a laugh this big does not happen that often. Savor it.

The movie? Just as silly as you'd expect, but maybe twice as much fun. The special effects are super, particularly those amazing titular dragons. The action scenes are extremely well-done, too (especially the destruction of downtown Los Angeles), and since these comprise at least half the running time (which is quite short: barely 80 minutes plus credits), even if you hate the movie, you'll have wasted much less time here than with this-was-supposed-to-be-good-so-why-it-is-such-crap films currently decorating our theatre screens with color and light. I can't imagine what must have been going through the minds of the American actors (who include the likes of Forster, Chris Mulkey, Elizabeth Peña, Jason Behr, among others) as they were making this movie. I do hope none of them were practicing "the method," because trying to find "motivation" amidst the many eye-and-mind-popping plots twists would have driven Stanislavski himself around the bend. Better not to worry and consider instead the generous paycheck each cast member probably deposited.