Reign of Fire

It may be the middle of the summer, but at the movies, it feels more like Thanksgiving. Implausible even by sci-fi standards, the oversized cinematic turkey that is Reign of Fire is burnt to a crisp with ridiculous dialogue, a surprisingly slow pace and more post-apocalyptic movie cliches than you can shake a matchstick at.

The year is 2020, and the world has been taken over by a swarm of highly evolved dragons. A small group of humans manage to survive in a far off community, where their obsessed leader (Christian Bale) is forced to go head-to-head with an arrogant American (Matthew McConaughey) who shows up with a way to get rid of the beasts. Despite facing unbeatable odds, both parties team up in an effort to overcome their fire-breathing captors once and for all and take back the planet.

It's hard to say where Reign of Fire goes wrong first, but for starters, where are all the dragons? With the exception of the last scene, we only see one of them attack the human outpost, and as a result, we never feel the full impact of their threat. In addition, if nothing short of nuclear weapons could stop them, then why are the humans defending themselves with insignificant little rifles? (Yeah, I know it's just a movie, but even a sci-fi flick like this has to make some sense.)

Reign of Fire takes itself way too seriously to be the campy fun that it should have been, and as directed by Rob Bowman (who also directed the big screen version of The X-Files), its dark Road Warrior-style vision of the future makes the film feel much closer to sub-par movies like Waterworld, The Postman and (of all things) Battlefield Earth [Ooh! Low blow! - Ed]. There's also a lame attempt to establish some depth between characters, but since they shout at each other in such thick accents, it's hard to understand what they're saying (which is probably a good thing).

One has to wonder what Matthew McConaughey was thinking when he signed up to play the buff bad-ass who leads the humans against the dragons. Although he seems to relish playing the over-the-top action hero, no amount of scene-chewing could have saved his cringe-inducing dialogue. As for his rival-turned-partner, Christian Bale is stuck in a gritty, one-note performance that keeps his character from resonating on any level whatsoever. It's a shame, since Bale is a fine actor whose stardom continues to elude him.

Even if a movie is bad, I'll still enjoy it simply because I love the process of going to the movies. Having said that, I still found Reign of Fire to be a colossal waste of time.