ERAGON

FOX

RELEASED 15 December 2006

Based on a book written by a fifteen-year old (which explains a lot), Eragon (debutant Edward Speleers) finds a shiny blue stone, which we know belonged to the king (played by John Malkovich), because he speaks the first line of the movie, wait for it... ‘I want my stone’. Cue much unintended laughter from the audience. So it turns out that the stone happens to be an egg, which hatches into a cute baby dragon that magically bonds with our young hero, thus turning him into a dragon rider (another unintentionally amusing line involves the sexually suggestive ‘riding a beast’, but I’m pretty sure that will ‘fly’ over the kids heads). Hero, dragon, and wise ex-rider and Obi-Wan/Gandalf -like old dude Brom (Jeremy Irons) journey to the rebel stronghold ahead of the evil King’s men and beasties.

The only thing I thought worked in ‘Eragon’ was the baby dragon special effects, which lasted all of five minutes before the beast ‘magically’ (ie. to cut down on running time) turned into a fully-grown adult. Other than that, this is a straight-to-video movie that happens to be a major Christmas release that will die a horrible death at the box-office. It blatantly steals bits from other movies (the already mentioned ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’), it has pedestrian script, a boring storyline, un-special effects, cheap location photography, a horribly derivative soundtrack, mis-casting (Djimon Hounsou doesn’t look like he knows what he’s doing, Robert Carlyle plays a baddie with glamour model red hair and make-up that looks like it was applied by a children’s face painter). And John Malkovich should be ashamed of himself for such a pathetic performance, especially after giving such a great performance in the US indie hit ‘Art School Confidential’. I cannot deter you from seeing this enough.

ONE OUT OF FIVE