source: Dragon Dynasty

Moviecut—Dragon Dynasty

2006's Dragon Dynasty is a made for sci-fi channel piece of southern Eurojank, ripping off both Eragon and Ip Man somewhat with considerable production value, but little of anything else under the hood. Some meme worthy acting and CGI dragons lacking texture give the viewer little reprise as the majority of the film is as cliche as it can get whilst having quite the oddball take of crowbarring in dragons into a Marco Polo biography. Now that takes some serious lethargy on someone's part. Dragon Dynasty has little focus, save for some evil sorcerer out to get Marco Polo and even then, we spend way too much time with secondary and tertiary characters, bland as all hell, as was the norm for made for tv movies around this time. Flat performances, a stilted screenplay and a general why are we even here feeling permeates the experience that is Dragon Dynasty. A depressing watch, but definitely not the Oscar winning kind.

First off DON"T TURN THIS INTO A DRINKING GAME! If you yell Polo and take a shot you may not make it through movie Do you know that improv game where one person starts telling a story until a moderator yells cut and someone else takes over? That's how they wrote this movie.

I was not expecting much from Dragon Dynasty, expecting a fantasy/ adventure film on the same terrible level as something like Age of the Dragons. It was a little better than expected, some of the scenery is decent as are the dragons, and the underwater shot is also quite nice. However, everything else is really bad. The dull lighting and hackneyed editing meant that I didn't get a sense of wonder I want to feel for a movie of this genre. The music is generic and unimaginative, the dialogue is so clichéd and anachronistic that I couldn't help laughing aloud on several occasions and the story is very contrived with some dull spots in the middle. The characters I didn't feel or care anything for, and the acting is wooden, and even decent actors like James Hong are given little to do. All in all, really bad. 2/10 Bethany Cox

It's hard to know where to start with this movie. From the contrived, implausible plot, the numerous anachronisms, the incredibly clichéd dialogue to the consistently wooden acting, it's fair to say every aspect of the film has been done better before. That said, I actually enjoyed it, and if like me you dig Hawk The Slayer and suchlike, you probably will too. There was seldom more than a few minutes between laugh-out-loud moments (mostly from the dialogue), the only thing that let it down from this perspective was that some of the parts in between were quite boring. The general feel is of a teenager writing their first adventure for a fantasy roleplaying game. To summarise, in terms of actual quality 3 out of 10 is probably on the generous side, but for those who like bad fantasy films, it's probably worth at least a 7 or 8.

I watched this last night on Sci-Fi. I found it very enjoyable. The action scenes were well done, with about three or four "wow, that was cool" moments. The underwater shot was brilliant...I'm glad they took the time to do that. I liked that the story was embedded in a historical setting and tried to stay true to that. The only major disappointment for me was that I really didn't care about the characters. Their life/death and happiness/sadness didn't really matter to me. I'm not sure why...perhaps it was the clichéd scenes surrounding their life/death and happiness/sadness. I give it a 6 out of 10, mostly based on enjoyment rather than the criteria for what makes a "good movie".

Dragon Dynasty