‘Train Your Dragon’ could use more girl power
Parents are all too familiar with sequels like “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.”
On the one hand, it’s a relief to have a new installment of a franchise that just might be wearing out its welcome in the family DVD player. At the same time … couldn’t they have tried a little harder to keep the adults interested?
With a distinct lack of new ideas to expand on a once-charming fantasy about Viking dragon hunters, “The Hidden World” has big-screen visuals but a script that should have gone direct to video.
The main attraction here is a new dragon design, a female Night Fury with snow-white scales with magical camouflage.
She is, of course, a romantic interest for the frisky Toothless, touching off an obligatory if-you-love-somebody-set-them-free subplot for
our bumbling hero, Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel).
This creates about as much dramatic tension — that is to say, none at all — as the arrival of a new villain, Grimmel, with a serpentine face and a vaguely Slavic accent courtesy of F. Murray Abraham. Grimmel is bent on hunting Night Furies to extinction, because, well, he’s a villain, and this movie needed a villain.
The plot is thin and holey and the characters are mostly just a single gag set on repeat (the chatty twins Ruffnut and Tuffnut being the most annoying examples).
Female characters are distinctly underdeveloped (and thus their actors underused). Cate Blanchett swooped in last time around (2014) as a dragon rider whose real job in the story turned out to be to give her long lost son, Hiccup, an infusion of self-esteem.
In “Hidden World,” her job is to pass the baton of this duty to Hiccup’s girlfriend (America Ferrera, sassy but still sidelined). Do you hear wedding bells? Of course you do.
Is this the best girl power that writerdirector Dean DeBlois could muster for his story? In 2019?
One kudo to this lazy effort: The climax does have a real end-of-a-trilogy feel, making further sequels less likely.
Silver linings, folks.