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Age of the Dragons (2011)

Olly Buxton by Olly Buxton
March 1, 2011
in Feature, Film Review
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You know how sometimes you wonder how a film ever came to be made? How it ever survived the tenuous and tortuous gestation period through which commercially produced motion pictures go?

How, given it must have cost millions of dollars, occupied fully the professional lives of several dozen people for maybe six months or a year (not just the actors and director but countless cameramen, make-up artists, costume designers, scriptwriters, set builders, compositors, special effects guys, key grips, best boys and so on) that someone had enough energy and a sufficiently plausible straight face to persuade all those people, and their financiers, of its fundamental worthwhileness to even be made?

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Age of Dragons – surely to Herman Melville what Rick Wakeman’s Camelot On Ice was to Thomas Mallory – is one of those films. It’s difficult to see how that bubble-bursting, Emperor’s-nudity-identifying moment didn’t come mid-way through the pitch, or even earlier, during the (presumably drunken) bar-room conversation in which young, dim scriptwriter seizes on the big idea: “Eureka! I’ve got it! Moby Dick … Only on LAND! … With DRAGONS!”

Somehow, it happened. Unlike Travolta’s Battlefield Earth or Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, Age of the Dragons has no big name Hollywood “auteur” behind it bamboozling the usual BS detectors with which Hollywood majors are festooned. That this film ever saw the light of day is, simply put, a cock-up, for which someone – probably quite a few people – will be fired.

Moby Dick for landlubbers. Lord, give me strength.

Now taking place on dry land presents some obvious dramatic challenges to Melville’s original story. It takes away the need for everyone to be holed up, festering, on a boat in the middle of a seething ocean. There is no threshold-crossing moment when our hero vaults the gunwale, away from safe dry land and commends his mortal soul to the unknowable madness of a possessed man. Since these absences futz with the dramatic set up of Moby Dick, director Ryan Little contrives to have them all set off on a boat anyway. An ironclad boat. On wheels. Every now an then, they all hop out of it and wander about.

In this and many other ways Ryan Little’s film takes large liberties with Melville’s plot, whilst keeping sacred faith with smaller details, the way you’d do if you had only a passing familiarity with the story. A voice-over describes second mate Stubbs (a comparatively excellent Vinnie Jones) in terms strikingly reminiscent of the Wikipedia entry for Moby Dick.

Ryan Little might still have got away with all of this had he an intelligent screenplay, a capable cast or at least a sense of humour at his disposal. That the scant display of any of the three comes in the single person of Vinnie Jones, who really is the best thing in the film by a country mile (until his character snuffs it at the end of the first act), ought to tell you all you need to know.

Danner Glover – yes, the very same – appears eventually as Ahab, chews far more scenery than any of the dragons, and elsewhere hovers between being clad in protective clothing of a (vaguely) George Clintonesque aspect and sharing screen time with a younger version of himself, in an oft-repeated flashback to a childhood incident featuring the dragon, his sister, a bucket, a river and a field of barley (symbolism highly resemblent of Gladiator, but pointed at nothing in particular). Anthropomorphising the Captain’s torment beyond the obsessive lust for revenge – not something Herman Melville felt any need to do – also seems an odd decision.

Other than that, there’s little to say. It’s frightfully derivative. The snow special effects are dreadful. Outside of Jones’ twinkling eye and Glover’s histrionics, the workaday cast spar gamely with a dreadful script, but cannot land a blow. Corey Sevier’s Ishmael is anodyne and forgettable in all respects bar his resemblance to an effete Colin Farrell. Kepa Kruse – now there’s a stage name – plays Queeqeg as a literate savage whose role in life is continually to bail out poor wet little Ishmael but otherwise makes no sense that cannot be extracted from foreknowledge of Melville’s book. Sofia Pernas, as luscious Rachel, plays Ishmael’s romantic opposite (surprise! Melville didn’t think of that either!) by lurching uneasily between Xena Warrior Princess and a traditionally distressed Hollywood damsel.

Meanwhile, despite mountainous quantities of earnestness, Ryan Little fails to inject an iota of drama, pacing or much in the way of character arc into proceedings and then fully squanders the opportunity for redemption by means of a dramatic final showdown, which simply never materialises.

It’s all over in an hour and a half, and (this could become a catchphrase, I know) at least it isn’t in 3D.

Age of the Dragons is in cinemas this Friday, 4th March 2011.

Director: Ryan Little
Stars: Danny Glover, Vinnie Jones, Corey Sevier
Runtime: 94 mins
Country: USA

Film Rating: ★½☆☆☆

Tags: actioncar-crashCorey SevierDanny Gloverdragonsfantasyherman melvillemoby dickRyan Littlesci-fiVinnie Jones
Olly Buxton

Olly Buxton

Olly lives amongst the lush olive groves and cypress trees on the slopes of Mount Muswell, just north of London, where he has a thirty five acre lifestyle orchard and farm with lifetime partner Bridget and their small ('but growing!') herd of alpacas. When he's not darting around the corniches of Hamstead and Highgate on his convertible BSA motorcycle ('it's more of a cabriolet, really') or tasting his latest batch of extra virgin oil with the orchard's head oliculturalist, Ned, Olly researches for his forthcoming novel, a science fiction fantasy in which, courtesy of a time machine, it is David Bowie and not namesake Jim who is left to defend the Alamo from the siege of the Mexican Army. A committed Radical Marxist Ironist, Olly made his fortune during the world-wide anti-capitalist riots of 1999 on the back of the simple but ingenious idea: selling packed lunches and bottles of diet coke to hungry protesters at a huge mark-up. "FeedtheCommie.com", as he styled his fledgling business, quickly became an enormously profitable multinational operation, quenching thirsts and filling bellies of protesters, dissidents, exiles and other militant intellectuals during times of civil unrest and civil protest in thirty six countries around the globe, from its headquarters in Seattle. The company also secured lucrative sponsorship deals with (among others) Amnesty International, Greenpeace and the Socialist Workers' Party. Olly then consolidated his net worth by securitising the income streams from FeedtheCommie.Com, negotiating a successful IPO and selling his entire holding ('mostly to student Marxist Radicals I had befriended, I would point out') at the top of the market. As of its public debut, FeedtheCommie.com is yet to make any revenue and is currently trading at 6 per cent of its par value. Nevertheless, Olly doesn't feel too bad about the sub-class of bankrupt Marxists he has created. "It's what they would have wanted". Now the second richest man in the world, Olly has settled into a life of writing political philosophy, voyaging on journeys of self discovery ('I find something new about myself every day. This morning it was dandruff'), and ceramic painting (pointillism).

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