Age of the Dragons

When any film stars Vinnie Jones in it, you pretty much know what you’re in for; cockney accents, hard men, a bit of casual misogyny, and maybe some gold teeth if you’re real lucky. Only this time Danny Glover, some random Americans and a big ass white dragon are thrown into the mix. Splendid.

The plot goes something like this. The young ‘Ahab’ (Danny Glover) is out rabbit hunting with his sister when a big white dragon comes and eats her. Though Ahab tries to fight the beast, he is left badly scarred and missing an eye. Understandably he is a bit peeved, and vows to kill the great dragon with help from daughter Rachel and other dragon slayers, who are out to collect glowy liquid ‘vitriol’ from the creatures. You can see how some creative tensions are gonna come about: Ahab is all about some good old fashioned honour killing, whilst the others are out for the dollars, or whatever currency used in yesteryear. Beans? Anyhoo, it all goes horribly wrong. Someone gets flame-throwered by a rogue dragon, Vinnie Jones smokes a pipe a lot and Danny Glover pulls out the ol’ crazy eyes (or eye).

Age of the Dragons sets up the premise that Rachel (pictured centre) is Ahab’s daughter, a patently ridiculous bit of casting which we believe for well over an hour until told otherwise. Though, compared to the crappy CGI dragons and strange limbo of a country in which they are slaying all these dragons (Wales? Europia?), the fact that Danny Glover has a white daughter seems almost believable.
All the actors (apart from an Englishman, who looked like the kind of person you would shimmy away from on the Tube) have impossibly white, Bruckheimer’s Pirates of the Caribbean-style white teeth. Rachel has carefully styled hair and make-up, with shearling coats that are disturbingly similar to the ones in Topshop.

Plotlines are similarly bonkers; Ishmael’s silent, broody twin is a ridiculous mix of oracle and capitalist. When they kill a herd of dragons but aren’t allowed to collect the vitriol, he goes on and on about how they will all end up in Hell. So apparently, slaughtering them for vitriol which you can sell for big money is fine, but if you don’t make money from them, oh no! We must stop the cold-blooded murder!
To be frank, I wished the dragon had killed everyone in the first 5 minutes, and can safely quote Danny Glover from his Lethal Weapon days when I say,

“I’m too old for this shit.”

About The Author