May 31, 1996

DRAGONHEART is directed by Rob Cohen. I have enjoyed several of Cohen’s movies, especially the one before this (DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY), and I’ve had fun joking about his specific brand of weirdo hackiness over the years, but since he has been accused of sexual assault by at least three people including his daughter I won’t joke about him or talk about him anymore. But I will talk about DRAGONHEART.

Sir Bowen (Dennis Quaid, JAWS 3-D, WYATT EARP) is a knight who mentors the Saxon Prince Einon (Lee Oakes), the little shit son of King Freyne (stuntman Peter Hric), who also has another right hand man called Brok (Brian Thompson, ALIEN NATION, MIRACLE MILE, LIFE STINKS). Brok calls Bowen “nursemaid” when he commands him to bring the prince to witness his father’s “noble victory” over rebelling peasants. Bowen tries to teach the kid “the Old Code” so he won’t be a massacring bastard like his no good father, but it really doesn’t take.

During the massacre the dumbass king wanders away from his army to personally set fire to a village he assumes is empty, then the peasants mob him and start to beat the shit out of him but for no reason their leader (Terry O’Neill, CONAN THE DESTROYER) says, “Stop! The battle is out there!” and then everybody leaves? What the fuck. So the prince may have a window to heroically save his father, but instead he pries the giant crown off of his head and slinks away just in time to be clumsily bumped by the peasant leader’s daughter Kara (Sandra Kovacicova), causing a wound that will slowly kill him.

Queen Aislinn (Julie Christie, NASHVILLE) comes up with a plan: carry the little twit to a dragon. They go to a cave to find a dragon who will later be called Draco (voice of Sean Connery between FIRST KNIGHT and THE ROCK). Einon has to swear to “live and rule with mercy” and come to the dragon to “learn the Once-ways.” Then Draco does some kind of magic to give half of his heart to the prince, healing him.

As King, Einon immediately starts acting like a maniac, so Bowen assumes the dragon’s heart corrupted him and vows to spend the rest of his life hunting him down. (Kind of pessimistic – shouldn’t he try to just do it right now?) For twelve years off screen, while Einon is growing into David Thewlis (BLACK BEAUTY) and Kara is growing into Dina Meyer (between JOHNNY MNEMONIC and STARSHIP TROOPERS), Bowen works as a dragon slayer for hire. A monk named Brother Gilbert of Glockenspur (Pete Postlethwaite, ALIEN 3) thinks he’s amazing and starts following him around like he’s Phish. That character adds almost nothing except a reminder that it’s always good to see Pete Postlethwaite in a movie. That was one good thing about the ‘90s.

I don’t understand why when Bowen finds Draco he doesn’t realize that it’s the one he’s been searching for. Doesn’t even seem to cross his mind to consider the possibility. They battle (mostly through Bowen hanging onto a rope and being comically bonked against trees) but when they end up at a draw (Bowen inside Draco’s mouth but with his sword poised to go through his brain) they decide to have a truce and become a traveling con artist team. They travel around to different communities where Draco can pretend to attack and Bowen can fake kill him for money. It reminds me a little bit of the fake ghost busting in THE FRIGHTENERS and THE BROTHERS GRIMM, but their game is much less elaborate. Still, the idea of a human/dragon buddy team is kinda cute.

Meanwhile, Kara bravely stands up to the King, but he kills her dad with an arrow right in front of her, imprisons her and tries to force her to marry him. His mother is not aligned with him morally or politically so she sneakily frees Kara in time for her to get mixed up with one of the fake dragon attacks and start to travel with our boys. She’s set up to be fairly cool but doesn’t make that much of an impression after that.

I didn’t like DRAGONHEART in 1996 and I still wouldn’t call myself a fan, but I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t as bland and boring as I remembered it being. It’s well known that the screenwriters felt their script was ruined by the director and by dumb executives. I don’t know how much I believed that at the time, but I can see it now – there are ingredients of a good fantasy story within the clunkiness. On this viewing I really liked the central conflict that I’d forgotten about entirely. Draco and Einon are connected by their heart, they feel each other’s pain and share each others’ fate. They really need to kill this evil king, but they realize that will kill the dragon, and the story doesn’t give them some cheat to get out of it. Also I like the idea that Draco was miserable and wanted to die, offering his heart to the human in hopes it would get him into dragon heaven, then only clinging to life because he worried the king’s evil doomed his soul. I think if there was a little more depth to the character this could be very moving.

DRAGONHEART was conceived by Patrick Read Johnson (BABY’S DAY OUT), who started with the idea of the knight in the dragon’s mouth and making the deal to run the scam. He pitched it as “THE SKIN GAME with a dragon in it.” He had the beginning and ending but developed the rest with Charles Edward Pogue, a playwright turned screenwriter who had done PSYCHO III and the remake of THE FLY (before Cronenberg rewrote it). On his websight, Pogue’s Pages, he writes that “DRAGONHEART, despite the disappointment of the film (for me, at least) was a transcendant script, closest to me in all aspects (and subsequently one of the fastest and easiest things I ever wrote), and was a joy to write.”

Sadly Johnson had developed the movie for himself to direct, but Universal broke the Old Code by pushing him off and hiring Richard Donner for about half a year. Kenneth Branagh made an offer to direct and star. That might’ve been funny. A vain, shirtless knight. Read had wanted Liam Neeson to play Bowen, but Universal was against it, even though he’d already starred in DARKMAN for them! The fuckers. They supposedly sent the script to Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Actually I’d like to see all of those versions.

Johnson was the one who cast Connery, though he wanted him to do a weird voice, not just his regular one. He was also able to shoot some test footage with an animatronic Draco made by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and unknown Clive Owen as Bowen, but Universal was seeing ILM’s footage for JURASSIC PARK and wanted to wait for that technology to be ready. Maybe they had the right idea – “CGI dragon” was the main selling point and what worked best about the movie at the time – but it meant rewriting the script to have less Draco, to save money. Reportedly they lost a whole thing of Bowen flying around on his back.

The great Phil Tippett worked with fellow JURASSIC PARK vet Peter Konig to come up with the look for Draco, and Tippett’s studio designed the sequences. To my 2026 eyes Draco moves a little goofy (especially when he does human gestures), the closeups of his hands look terrible, his big flapping wings don’t seem to have enough of an effect on the environment around him, but mostly he’s okay to look at and a well done animated character for the era. And there are shots where they light him strategically, like in their second encounter in the cave, and I think he looks perfect.

Okay, seeing this still it probly seems like I was joking, but with parts of him flitting in and out of visibility and then moving forward into the sunlight it really does look cool, I swear.

Quaid got his sword training from Kiyoshi Yamazaki, who also trained Arnold Schwarzenegger for the CONAN movies. He seems committed. I don’t hate him in the role but I don’t think he brings enough to it to shine. I can’t imagine there were many people coming out thinking “You know who’s cool? Sir Bowen.” If there were, I’m gonna pin that on the aggressively corny score by Randy Edelman. Just like DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY, it will seem very familiar to you even if you’re seeing the movie for the first time, because its themes have been recycled for decades in trailers and Olympics broadcasts. So I can’t deny their effectiveness.

The movie didn’t quite make double its budget in theaters, which according to legend means it couldn’t have been profitable, but if so it seems to have worked out in the end because it turned into a DTV franchise. If there was no money in the Dragonheart business they probly wouldn’t have ended up with DRAGONHEART: A NEW BEGINNING (2000), DRAGONHEART 3: THE SORCERER’S CURSE (2015), DRAGONHEART: BATTLE FOR THE HEARTFIRE (2017) and DRAGONHEART: VENGEANCE (2020). Oh shit – there’s one called VENGEANCE? Do I need to watch these?

At any rate, Johnson keeps talking about there should be a remake, and thanks to this revisit I would be cautiously intrigued if it were to happen. The thing is, though, they could do way better dragon animation now, but no one would be impressed because we’ve seen it before. So ironically it might be more attractive to audiences if they went back to the original idea of animatronics as much as possible. I can see the featurettes now. And I nominate Tom Hardy for any or all of the lead roles (knight, dragon, king).

tie-ins:

There were Kenner action figures (including dragons not in the movie), a Revell model kit, Topps trading cards, and a two-issue comic book adaptation (also from Topps).

The novelization was by screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue, apparently staying true to his vision from the script that didn’t make it into the movie. The earlier quote about how much he enjoyed writing the script continues, “I also think I took giant steps as a writer and went to another plane in my style and the way I approach the work. I loved it so much that I ended up writing the novel of it, because I wanted to record that joy that could not get destroyed in the film-making process. The novel was the most fulfilling writing experience I ever had.”

There was a poorly reviewed side-scrolling video game called Dragonheart: Fire & Steel for PlayStation, Sega Saturn and Windows, and a different game just called Dragonheart for Game Boy. In addition to befriending Draco and battling the king’s army, in Fire & Steel Bowen has to kill seven evil dragons.