Review: 'How to Train Your Dragon' is a sturdy, action-packed live-action remake of the animated original
It’s been 15 years since DreamWorks made one of their best animated movies, “How to Train Your Dragon” — and now, some of the same players have teamed up to make a live-action version that opens up the seemingly endless debate of what is gained by doing with human actors what already has been done so well with pixels and paint.
So far this year, Disney has trotted out live-action reworkings of their 1937 landmark movie “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and their 2002 charmer “Lilo & Stitch” — following in the footsteps of so many others, mostly from the Disney archives, including “The Lion King,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Mulan” and more. Seems only fitting for DreamWorks to want to get in on the action, particularly when their corporate partners at Universal have a “How to Train Your Dragon” theme park opening in Orlando.
I don’t care too much about the idea that these live-action cash grabs — their reasons for existence are more economic than artistic — are inherently evil. There have been dozens of movie versions of “Hamlet,” and we’re well past calling them a blot on the memory of what ol’ Will S. staged back in Stratford in 1599 or whenever. I take my live-action remakes one at a time, and judge them as I see them today.
With that in mind, I declare that this “How to Train Your Dragon” — written and directed by Dean DeBlois, who co-wrote and co-directed the 2010 animated version with Chris Sanders — strikes a strong dramatic tone, even if he could stand to stray from the source material a bit more.
As before, we’re on the small north Atlantic isle of Berk, where Vikings scratch out a tough existence that’s sometimes punctuated by random attacks by fire-breathing dragons. Berk’s chieftain, Stoick (played then and now by Gerard Butler), is the hardest Viking of all — which means he’s often disappointed in his son, Hiccup (Mason Thames), who’s far more brains than brawn.
Hiccup tries to impress Stoick by building a weapon that he thinks can take down the nastiest dragon of all, a night fury — a breed no Viking has ever killed or captured. When Hiccup tries out the weapon during a dragon attack, it seems to go haywire, deepening Stoick’s disappointment.
But when Hiccup goes into the woods, he discovers that he actually grounded a night fury — and the black beast is trapped in a canyon, unable to get off the ground because Hiccup injured the dragon’s tail. Hiccup also discovers that the dragon, which he calls Toothless, isn’t a killer after all.
What follows, as with the original, is a clever juxtaposition of two parallel stories. In one, Hiccup works to gain Toothless’ trust, trains him to be ridden, and invents a prosthetic tail assembly for him. In the other, Hiccup is pressed into dragon-fighting training with the teens who usually tease him, where he works to impress the gutsiest young fighter of all, Astrid (played by Nico Parker).
It’s this middle section where the new version really cooks, as it establishes the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless, and the tensions among Hiccup’s teen classmates, more completely than the animated version did. Credit the expressive nature of the actors, particularly Thames and Parker, and the extended screen time DeBlois gives them. (The movie clocks in a half-hour longer than the animated film.)
If you’re truly enamored with the animated film, seeing live-action scenes that copy the original beat for beat — like the iconic moment of Toothless first allowing Hiccup to touch his snout — can be maddening. It would have been nice for DeBlois and his team to rethink new ways to capture that narrative, but I’m sure “the suits” would have complained that they weren’t getting the “How to Train Your Dragon” they were expecting.
Here’s the thing, though: This is the “How to Train Your Dragon” you’re expecting. And because the original was really good, it’s not too hard to believe that a copy, made by the people who gave the first one so much care and attention, could get it right — or mostly right — a second time.
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‘How to Train Your Dragon’
★★★
Opens Friday, June 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for sequences of intense action, and peril. Running time: 125 minutes.