“How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.” Let’s get right down to what you’re wanting to know: 1) Is it good for kids, 2) is it good for adults, and 3) is it as good as its predecessors?
It’s definitely good for kids, and seated behind me at the critic press screening was a nice, adult lady critic who told me, over and over, and over, and over, and over again, how much she loved this series of taming-the-dragon movies. And so there you have it—yes, and yes. And for No. 3—not really.
The sequel (2014) dealt with now-Hiccup’s-a-teenager issues. And this third installment grows Hiccup all the way up, to where he eventually grows a beard and looks remarkably like actor John Krasinski. And finally takes his place in the leadership lineage of this forefathers.
What Goes On
So, Hiccup is now king of Berk, an island village where humans live in harmony with their dragon pets. It sort of looks like parts of Brazil, very crowded, with everything and everyone stacked on top of each other. In fact, it has a slightly, amusingly, uncomfortably crowded, ghetto-ish look about it. I couldn’t help but think of the inevitable hygiene issues. Hercules and the stable of King Augeas came to mind.Hiccup’s life’s mission is still as the leader of a dragon-rescue squad, liberating dragons everywhere from captivity. Which is why Berk is now overcrowded. The ineptness of Hiccup’s dragon-saving crew is more than compensated for by his hot-rod dragon’s outsized capacity for mayhem and routing enemies, to the point where it’s called into question whether Hiccup would actually be anything without his dragon.
Anyway, cue new bad guy: dragon-hunter Grimmel the Grisly (voiced by F. Murray Abraham in fine, disdainful form). His dragon philosophy is diametrically opposed to Hiccup’s—enslave ‘em or kill ’em all! It’s slightly understandable, given his hench-dragons are sort of nasty, scorpion-like belchers of what appears to be green, hydrochloric acid. Yuck.
Grimmel’s coming for Toothless! It’s on! What to do?! Release all the Krakens! Dragons, I mean! Take them all back to their true home, far across the sea, and down in the depths of the oceans, via a secret portal!
This is the best part of the movie, the hidden world, bringing to mind James Cameron’s “Avatar” world, looking sort of like a colossal subterranean aviary, the size of which dwarfs immense dragons to the point that they look like flocks of wheeling birds. There should have been more of this world.
While Grimmel hunts for Toothless, Toothless has a beach courtship of his new(t) bride-to-be, which takes the form of many of the bird courtship dances you’ve seen on YouTube and Facebook. Quite cute.
And you’ll immediately start to conjecture about the look of the offspring of black Toothless and white Newt (that’s what I’m naming her). The nice critic lady behind me hoped loudly that one would be a tiny, white Light Fury, with a black ring around one eye, like Pete the Pup from the “The Little Rascals.”
And then there’s Hiccup getting married to Astrid (America Ferrera). Other returning characters are in flashbacks of Hiccup’s hulking Scottish dad (Gerard Butler), Viking Eret (Kit Harington), Snotlout (Jonah Hill), Fishlegs (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), Ruffnut (Kristen Wiig), Tuffnut (Justin Rupple), and Gobber (Craig Ferguson).
There won’t be another “Tame Your Dragon” movie, but if the new, James Cameron-produced “Alita: Battle Angel” is any indication, we can look forward to some excellent zooming and booming in his next “Avatar.”
