7 / 10
Official trailer
Rob Cohen directed. Sean Connery voices Draco, the last dragon, who gave half his heart to a boy who grew up to be a tyrant and now has to figure out what to do about that. The boy is King Einon, played by David Thewlis, and his old teacher is Bowen, Dennis Quaid’s knight turned dragon hunter. Pete Postlethwaite plays Brother Gilbert, a monk who travels with Bowen. Dina Meyer plays the love interest. Julie Christie plays the queen.
There’s a soft spot in me for this movie that its script doesn’t earn. Draco is so good that I forgive a lot, and whenever Connery’s voice comes rumbling out of that dragon I’m happy, but whenever the camera drifts back to the humans I start waiting for the dragon to come back.
The film made approximately one hundred and fifteen million dollars worldwide on a fifty-seven million dollar budget.
It was a moderate commercial success and a financial disappointment given the production cost. The dragon effects, by Industrial Light & Magic, were nominated for an Academy Award and have aged unusually well. The script is the limiting factor.
The Dragon
Sean Connery’s vocal performance as Draco is the foundation of the film.
The character is a centuries-old dragon who has been carrying guilt over a single mistake for most of his long life. Connery plays him as a Scottish nobleman wearing reptilian skin. The dignity is real. The exhaustion is real. The decision to share his heart with a dying boy and watch the boy grow up to be a monster is the central tragedy and Connery understands the weight of it.
The ILM animation gives Connery’s vocal work a physical face. Draco’s expressions are subtle. He smiles. He grimaces. He looks tired. The combination of the animation and the voice produces a character who has more interior life than any of the human performers around him.
Draco is the reason this film gets a 7 at all. Connery’s voice gives him a sad, amused dignity, and the animators matched it so well that I stop thinking about effects within a scene or two.
For Writers
A non-human character can carry a story if the writer treats them as a person instead of as a creature. Draco has a backstory, regrets, relationships, and goals. He’s a character first and a dragon second. The lesson is that fantasy creatures need the same care as human characters. They can’t be impressive because they’re large. They have to be interesting because they have specific lives. Spend the effort on their interior. The audience will accept anything if the interior is real.
The Human Plot
The human plot is the film’s problem. Dennis Quaid is fine but the script doesn’t give him much to work with. Bowen is a stock disillusioned knight. The romance with Kara is functional but never finds its footing. The peasants Bowen and Draco fleece in their scam-hunting routine are funny but never become characters. The third-act revolt against the tyrant Einon has the shape of a satisfying climax without the weight that would have made it work.
David Thewlis as Einon is the most interesting human performance, but the role is structurally constrained. Einon has half a dragon’s heart in his chest. Killing Einon will kill Draco. The plot collapses into the inevitable question of whether Draco will accept his own death to end the tyrant. The audience can see this coming from the first reel. The film doesn’t surprise.
The human side of Dragonheart loses me. Quaid is likable, but Bowen is a pile of knight clichés, and I’d have cut the romance with Kara entirely to spend more time on the con act Bowen and Draco run on the villagers, the only human material with any life in it.
For Writers
A predictable ending is acceptable if the path to the ending is gripping. Dragonheart’s ending is signaled from the first act. The audience knows Draco will sacrifice himself. The middle doesn’t do enough to make the ending hit harder. The lesson is that predictable endings need extraordinary middles. If the reader can guess the destination, the route has to be unexpectedly rich. Dragonheart’s route is too thin to redeem the predictable arrival.
The Climax
The climactic scene is the moment Draco asks Bowen to kill him, because killing him will kill the tyrant inside Einon.
Bowen has to throw the axe. Draco accepts it. The film handles this scene with more grace than the rest of the runtime suggests it would. Connery’s vocal work in the final exchange is moving. The animation of Draco’s last moments is the production’s best work.
What follows Draco’s death is conventional fantasy resolution: the peasants free the kingdom, Bowen wins the girl and Brother Gilbert composes a poem. The real weight of the ending is the loss of the dragon, and the film doesn’t stay on that loss long enough. I’d have ended on Draco’s last moments and let the rest go unsaid, because the victory lap cheapens the one scene the film gets completely right.
For Writers
A film’s emotional weight is usually concentrated in one element. The film should respect that concentration in its final minutes. Dragonheart’s weight is the loss of Draco. The final scenes give the audience the conventional resolution beats and only briefly mourn the dragon. The lesson is to end where the weight is, not where the structural convention says to end. Genre conventions are defaults you can override when the story requires it.
Craft Note
Rob Cohen directed. Charles Edward Pogue wrote, story by Pogue and Patrick Read Johnson. Dennis Quaid as Bowen. Sean Connery as the voice of Draco. David Thewlis as Einon. Pete Postlethwaite as Brother Gilbert. Dina Meyer as Kara. Julie Christie as Queen Aislinn. Industrial Light & Magic produced the dragon effects. Randy Edelman composed the score. Released May 1996. Approximately fifty-seven million dollar budget. One hundred and fifteen million worldwide gross. Academy Award nomination for Visual Effects.
Is Dragonheart worth watching?
7/10. The dragon is great and everything else is okay. Sean Connery’s voice work and ILM’s animation produce a fantasy creature I’d put up against anything filmed since, and his death scene moves me. The human script never catches up, and that gap is exactly why I can’t go higher than a 7. Watch it for Draco. Skip it if you need the rest of the film to be at the dragon’s level.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Dragonheart, Wikipedia
- Dragonheart, RogerEbert.com
- DragonHeart (1996), IMDb
