Film Reviews: How to Train Your Dragon | Tornado | Ballerina
This live action remake of the animated 2010 hit How To Train Your Dragon retains much of the appeal of the original, but it also feels vaguely pointless, writes Alistair Harkness
How to Train Your Dragon (PG) ★★★
Tornado (15) ★★
Ballerina (15) ★★★
With the bafflingly big box-office haul for Disney’s current Lilo & Stitch remake once again justifying the studio’s creatively dubious decision to do live-action remakes of its animation classics, it’s surprising it’s taken as long for other studios to follow suit. But here’s DreamWorks with its own live action re-do of How to Train Your Dragon, its instant classic 2010 hit about an inventive Viking kid who rejects his dragon-slayer heritage after befriending an injured fire-breather called Toothless.
The original film — based on the book series by Cressida Cowell — inspired two pretty decent sequels and a spin-off animated TV show; it also boasted incredible visuals and provided Gerard Butler with a rare opportunity to deploy his gruff Paisley burr as the voice of hapless hero Hiccup’s burley chieftain father Stoick. Though Butler is the only returning cast member to survive the transition — he’s clearly having a blast as the in-the-flesh version of his cartoon counterpart — the film remains an oddly faithful simulacrum of the animated version.
That’s both good and bad. Good because everything that worked about the first film — the soaring visuals, the sweet bond between Hiccup and Toothless, the amusing training montages — also works this time round; bad because, well, it all feels vaguely pointless. Still, it now exists and it’s not exactly a chore to sit through.
After a shaky opening salvo setting up the basics of the story — the Vikings still all live on an island called Berk and are locked in an ongoing battle to protect themselves and their livestock from the dragons plundering their land for food — returning director Dean Deblois soon finds his rhythm, with Mason Thames a winning presence as the desperate-to-please Hiccup, Nico Parker feisty and fun as the more capable slayer-in-training Astrid, and Nick Frost a goofy delight as Stoick’s right-hand man Gobber. But please, can we just have some new family films instead of all these redos?
It’s been ten years since Scottish writer/director John Maclean’s pleasingly strange debut Slow West marked the former Beta Band member out as a filmmaker with a keen sense of how to subvert classic genres like the western. Sadly, that’s not quite the case with his belated follow-up film Tornado, a wilderness thriller with an intriguing samurai twist, set in an unnamed part of the British Isles in 1790, though shot primarily in Scotland.
It stars Tim Roth and Jack Lowden as Sugarman and Little Sugar, the father-son leaders of a group of murderous marauders who, as the film opens, are in pursuit of a young Japanese woman. We don’t yet know why, but as the film’s puzzle-box structure starts to fall into place details gradually emerge: some stolen gold has gone missing during the performance of a samurai-themed touring puppet show that the woman, who goes by the name of Tornado, performs with her father Fujin, a taciturn traditionalist who wants his resistant daughter to retain a connection to their homeland (Tornado is played by rising Japanese star Kōki; Fujin by Shōgun star Takehiro Hira).
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Their familial tension finds a harsher parallel in the relationship between Sugarman and Little Sugar, who resents his father’s insistence on giving every member of the gang an equal share of the loot he apparently did the most to procure. When the two groups’ paths cross in violent fashion, these simmering generational conflicts come to the fore, but only Roth — whose character’s bleeding stomach wound feels like an arch tribute to his role in Reservoir Dogs — is given enough material to imbue proceedings with any real depth. The rest of the film is so vaguely sketched there’s no sense of who these characters are or what this world is. Consequently, when it eventually turns into a bloody revenge movie, the action feels frustratingly stilted and repetitive, the title character never quite becoming the force of nature her name implies.
There’s much more pulpy fun to be had in Ballerina, an entertainingly ludicrous spin-off from the John Wick franchise in which Ana De Armas makes good on the action star potential glimpsed in No Time To Die to play an orphan raised in a ballet school that doubles as a front for an elite assassin training facility.
Said school was first introduced in John Wick 3: Parabellum and the movie takes place in that film’s timeline, with Keanu Reeves popping up in an extended cameo to recreate some scenes from that film, and a few new ones too, as De Armas’s character, Eve, is encouraged to “fight like a girl” and embark on her own kill-crazy mission to avenge her father’s murder.
Though the back story is a bit rote — it’s almost identical to Black Widow and the Jennifer Lawrence spy thriller Red Sparrow — the action builds to a suitably barmy showdown involving flamethrowers that kicks the whole thing up a gear.
How to Train Your Dragon and Ballerina are in cinemas now; Tornado is in cinemas from 13 June.
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