How to Train Your Dragon 2 Review
Well trained.
When you see every movie the week it comes out upon occasion you encounter a confluence of bad movie scheduling wherein you have seen everything that interests you and nothing comes out that seems worth the photons burned projecting the film from the screen to your eyeballs. This weekend looks pretty awful, with Think Like a Man (22% on Rotten Tomatoes) and Jersey Boys (56%, but the trailers make this film look like my worst nightmare. I have zero interest in the Four Seasons and actors talking to the camera is one of my personal grinds. Unless your name is Deadpool the 4th wall is there for a reason). I will see them both this weekend but couldn’t find the motivation to see a early late night showing last night.
Fortunately there is always my old friend the animated feature to fall back on. I did not see the previous How to Train Your Dragon. I wasn’t doing reviews back then. However I seem to stumble across it every time I write something else as pretty much every celebrity in Hollywood seems to have done a voice for it. I don’t really feel the need to see it as my point that any film should stand on its own without a prerequisite stands doubly true for kids films as a lot of the audience in 2014 were at best in diapers back in 2010. If I feel lost watching a sequel to an animated film for the lack of the first one then the creators are on the fail boat for sure.
Thus I must deem this film a success. The relevant points from the first film (dragons used to be bad but were tamed by the main character and are now friendly and happy domestic creatures who fly and breath fire) was communicated relatively seamlessly, leaving us with a coherent story and some great characters. I thought at first I was going to hate Hiccup, the main character buecause he’s kind of a skinny young metrosexual wimp and his name is Hiccup (the trend these days seems to be to keep male leads in all movies as androgynous as possible in order to hide that fact that men sometimes have penises and the desire to use them. Sure seems like every girl I go out with has had that fact hidden from them) but then I realized he is actually pretty cool, has a mechanical leg, a flaming sword, and a really cool dragon to fly around on.
