Finale fails to take flight
● Visually stunning threequel could do with more fire in its belly
(6) HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD Directed by: Dean DeBlois Starring: Jay Baruchel, America Ferrera, F Murray Abraham, Kit Harington Reviewed by: Robbie Collin
For viewers steeped in the sagas of the young Viking Hiccup and his lovable scaly steed Toothless, it’s possible the third How to Train Your Dragon film will serve as a rousing trilogycloser. But for those of us for who always felt this series could have done with a little more fire in its belly, it’s a bit of a meandering postscript.
Since the release of its first instalment in 2010, DreamWorks’ animated fantasy franchise has kept up with its characters in something close to real time – and now its young hero, voiced by Jay Baruchel, has fetched up at the threshold of adulthood and has the delicately rendered bumfluff to prove it.
Toothless has reached the age at which a young dragon’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love – but danger is in the air too, in the form of a fleet of dragon trappers led by Grimmel the Grisly.
So a hasty evacuation must be planned from the island of Berk: not just the Vikings’ home, but also a sanctuary for giant winged lizards of every imaginable colour and shape.
The franchise’s writer and director Dean DeBlois treats these three quests – repelling baddies, seeking sanctuary, finding mates – as interwoven threads of the same epic tale. But they don’t hang together all that convincingly – as before, the only part that feels essential is the ongoing yarn of the Black Stallion-like bond between boy and beast.
Complications arrive in the form of a silvery female Light Fury, whom Toothless inexpertly, but very amusingly, tries to woo, in the film’s most wittily animated sequence.
Throughout, Hiccup encourages him from the sidelines, like a role-reversed version of Bagheera urging Mowgli on towards the man village and the doe-eyed girl with the water vase.
Not that Hiccup is reduced to gooseberry status. There is a new heat in his longstanding friendship with his fellow young Viking Astrid (America Ferrara) – who, other than Hiccup, is the only interesting member of the franchise’s now sizeable human cast.
The other half dozen or so could be nudged down a pit without the slightest effect on the plot, and most are so irritating, lobbing in variations on the same signature wisecrack from the sidelines, you’ll wish someone would.
The supporting non-humans are much more appealing, and when the dragons flock en masse, the result is a spectacle that out-wows many live-action blockbusters.
Cinematographer Roger Deakins is credited again as a visual consultant, and his expertise shows in the sweeping Nordic grandeur of the computer-generated scenery, whose Scandi-Avatar aesthetic – particularly when we reach the extraordinary Hidden World itself – is more ambitious than almost anything to date in the CG-animated field.
For a series that has always torn through technical boundaries at speed but whose storytelling stays scrupulously between the lines, it’s business as usual to the last. – The Telegraph