PG-13 | 1 h 43 min | Fantasy, Comedy | 1996
No matter how quaint it sounds, the “Old Code” of knighthood honors an ancient principle: right action can lead to right thought. If you’re persuaded to behave selflessly, committed to a cause bigger, higher than you are, you will find it harder to plot against yourself, let alone against your own. Knighthood hinges on doing the decent thing, not as an isolated action, but as a habit.
Director Rob Cohen’s “Dragonheart” is a funny, entertaining take on knighthood. The film spoofs it enough to argue against taking knighthood too seriously, but salutes it enough to suggest that the ancients may have a point: recognizing and rewarding the faith, loyalty, and courage that breeds it.
Cohen uses the drama of a dragon in one particular kingdom, to show why the best men are those who use their strength and skill to protect the weak, and uphold the truth.
A disillusioned knight Sir Bowen (Dennis Quaid) roams the kingdom. His pastime? Killing dragons. He mistakenly believes that a dragon’s half-heart, beating within the breast of his young king, Einon (David Thewlis), has turned the king hostile to his hapless subjects.
Against his instincts, Bowen befriends one distinguished looking dragon, Draco (Sean Connery), who claims to be the last of his kind. Together, they must find out the truth. Is Draco’s half-heart responsible for the evil that’s scorching the kingdom like a dragon’s breath? Or is it the king’s own petulance?
It helps that Draco not only breathes fire, as any self-respecting dragon does, but talks, as even self-respecting dragons do not. Bowen finds himself saddled with Draco’s reverence for the “Old Code” that he’d hoped to shrug off, and Draco’s irreverent sense of humor. When Kara (Dina Meyer) the local village beauty, stunned at Draco’s gift of the gab, exclaims with understatement that he’s not like a dragon at all, Draco siddles cheekily up to her and asks, “Well, how many dragons do you know?”
Quaid is dutifully swashbuckling but, rightly, plays the knight tongue-in-cheek. Even so, there are moments when he’s intense. Bowen struggles to confront Einon the man because, years ago, he’d taught the boy Einon the way of the Code. All that warmth disappears when Bowen hears that Einon never really believed in the Code; all he’d wanted was to learn from Bowen how to wield a sword.
Worse, Einon dismisses Bowen as the sorry scrap of a “dead world and dead beliefs.” Smarting, Bowen’s attitude to the rampaging king changes, from relative indifference to a fierce resolve to stop him.
Examples of Virtue
Connery’s voice is the lifeblood of the film, magisterial one moment, sheepish the next, imploring one minute, mischievous or daring the next. Of course, Connery’s played knight and king in a few films. Here, he’s regal as Draco, owing allegiance to no one but himself and the Code.As if Connery’s unmistakable voice wasn’t enough, the filmmakers double down to make Draco look and feel like the actor himself. In interviews, Industrial Light Magic’s Euan MacDonald admits they borrowed Connery’s real-life expressions, the arched eyebrow and curled lip, that fans are used to seeing on screens since the 1960s.
Draco, created almost entirely through CGI, cuts an impressive figure: 18 feet high, 43 feet long, and with a 72-foot-wide wing span. Only some sequences involve old-fashioned animatronics.
Julie Christie, who has played Lady Balmer on TV and Lady Trimingham in film, plays a convincing queen, caught between her duty as mother to do right by her son, and her duty as queen to do right by her subjects.
Cohen isn’t pretending to make high art; he doesn’t want you to look for cohesion or profundity. His film is far less about making anyone feel special (although knighthood does that) and much more about celebrating examples of everyday virtue, in girls and women, in boys and men, and through tried and tested positive reinforcement. Randy Edelman’s soaring score echoes that aspirational theme.
However impishly, screenwriters Charles Edward Pogue and Patrick Read Johnson are saying that the tradition of knighthood separates men from boys in the wisest and nicest of ways. They do that not through bravado, which, by its nature, is false, but by depicting what bravery really means, the way knights were separated from commoners in ancient times.
Not because knights were different or superior (most were commoners first, anyway), but because their values were both different and superior.
